purposes (as are all the rules of grammar) are not really the same thing as
the linguistic translation of information inscribed in the genes or neuronal
circuits: if the rule can be exploited, is made to be exploited, then it is a
conventional rule [thesei], rather than a natural law [phusei], and it is difficult
to conceive an innate property that anticipates the ways in which it will be
exploited (which, by definition, are diverse and innumerable). In reality, the
rules of grammar are pragmatic maxims of the sort ‘say this and that’ and,
like all maxims, they are ‘defeasible’ (a term derived from English legal
philosophy): ‘say this rather than that if you need to do it in order to express
what you want to say’. To describe the rules of grammar, I am in the process
of passing from the domain of laws of nature to the domain of law and
morality – i.e. social human practices.
We can go further in analysing the reflexive construction. Because the
construction is frequent, and equally present in all the registers of language,
it develops not in the quasi-immobile time of the evolution of the species,
but in that of human practice – i.e. the time of history. We can therefore
distinguish three synchronic uses of the construction, which are the sedimented
image of three stages in its history.
First we have the reflexiveconstruction proper (this is what Chomsky-type
syntactic rules, attributed to universal grammar, capture – except that it is
not innate or universal, but specific to the English language and subject to
its history). It is found in sentences such as:
(21) I said to myself...
In such sentences, the syntax conforms to rules of reflexive antecedence
and the meaning of the construction is homogeneous with its syntax: this
reflexive construction has a reflexive meaning.
Next comes the emphaticuse of the construction, where the syntactic
constraints are roughly the same, yet the meaning is no longer reflexive but
intensive: syntax and semantics are dissociated. We can see this in the contrast
between (21) and the following two sentences:
(22) I myself said it.
(23) Although I say it myself.
Last comes the honorificuse of the reflexive construction, where neither
syntax nor semantics is reflexive, even though reflexive pronouns are still
employed. Thus sentence (25) is a more polite, or more servile, version of
(24):
Critique of Linguistics • 33