A new look at possessive reflexivization: A comparative study between Czech and Russian

The paper presents a contrastive description of reflexive possessive pronouns “svůj” in Czech and “svoj” in Russian. The research concerns syntactic, semantic and pragmatic aspects. With our analysis, we shed a new light on the already investigated issue, which comes from a detailed comparison of the phenomenon of possessive reflexivization in two typologically and genetically similar languages. We show that whereas in Czech, the possessive reflexivization is mostly limited to syntactic functions and does not go beyond the grammar, in Russian it gets additional semantic meanings and moves substantially towards the lexicon. The obtained knowledge allows us to explain heretofore unclear marginal uses of reflexives in each language.