Reflexive marking in Fijian

Abstract

The Fijian language has long been believed to include no dedicated reflexive marker. This paper takes a close look at reflexive contexts within Fijian to arrive at the conclusion that the language, in fact, contains three distinct reflexive types, designated here as short (PRO), mid (PRO-ga), and long (PRO-ga-vakai-PRO) according to their morphological form. Moreover, different verbs in Fijian reflexive constructions are found to exhibit a certain degree of selective preference for specific reflexive types. The syntactic, semantic, and lexical characteristics of these three reflexive constructions are investigated in detail. The results of this research contribute to our general understanding of anaphora, binding requirements, and systems of coreference.