Some languages use a verbal affix while others use a special anaphoric pronoun. These mechanisms are not mutually exclusive, however.
Many languages have both.
The research in this thesis is driven by the question of how many systems are needed to account for this variability. I propose that the distribution of verbal reflexives is determined primarily by argument-structure representations while the distribution of nominal reflexives is determined primarily by syntactic representations. We do find, however, certain cases of overlap. In these cases, the existence of two systems is precisely what is required to achieve a level of explanatory adequacy. Chapter 2 begins with the observation that there is a systematic cross-linguistic ambiguity in verbal reflexives.