Intersubjectification in Cognitive Grammar: Reflecting on English and Polish Reflexives

The paper provides a cognitive grammar analysis of reflexivization phenomena in English and Polish. Three separate although related claims are made: (i) underlying reflexivization phenomena is the intersubjectification process which involves the so-called reference point relationship; (ii) the intersubjectification process takes place in the Current Discourse Space – CDS (Langacker 2008), whereby the degree of the antecedent’s accessibility for the reflexive pronoun is established; (iii) while in Polish, the antecedent’s accessibility is closely linked to the detransitivization process, in English, it is determined by the accessibility hierarchy in the sense of Kuno (1987).