2.1 The Grammatical Phenomenon

In order to put our theory into practice, we searched for an interesting grammatical phenomenon showing variation in its usage by different groups of speakers. Inspired by an article written by Günter Rohdenburg (2009), we finally decided on the field of reflexive structures in BE, AE, and ALE. In order to give the reader an insight into the grammatical phenomenon in question, a short summary of Rohdenburg's observations will be given and complemented by further information provided by commonly used grammars.

As is well known, some English verbs have to take a reflexive pronoun, e.g. to ensconce oneself, while there are others which can either be used with or without reflexive pronouns, e.g. to wash (oneself) (cf. Rohdenburg 2009: 166). When the reflexive pronoun is left out, this is called the zero variant (cf. Rohdenburg 2009: 166). Verbs which can take the zero variant are, for example, to empty (into), to trouble, to qualify (for), to oversleep, to keep (from) (cf. Rohdenburg 2009: 167-168) and also to wash, to shave, to dress, which, according to Murphy, “[w]e normally use […] without myself” (Murphy 2004: 164).

Rohdenburg points out that research pertaining to the use of reflexive marking since Early Modern English is scarce (cf. Rohdenburg 2009: 166). Nevertheless, two basic assumptions can be made. First, the use of personal pronouns (e.g. I washed me) has definitely been obsolete since the end of the Early Modern English period and its successor, namely the use of reflexive pronouns, “has been steadily contracting its range of application both in terms of verb types and its frequency of use” (Rohdenburg 2009: 166). Secondly, the decrease in usage of reflexive pronouns in Modern English is due to competing structures, with the zero variant being “the most direct and best researched (though not necessarily the most important) competitor” (Rohdenburg 2009: 166).

Based on these assumptions, Rohdenburg forms the hypothesis that “the reduction of overtly reflexive uses is continuing unabated and that it is AmE that has been implementing these changes faster and more extensively than BrE” (Rohdenburg 2009:166). Of course, the study presented in this paper cannot aim at proving all aspects of Rohdenburg's hypothesis as it is on a smaller scale and makes use of a different method which provides a different kind of results. Hence, while Rohdenburg observed the actual usage of reflexive structures in British and American corpora, our study is restricted to informants' acceptability judgements. However, the basic idea is the same. By making use of Magnitude Estimation, we will try to analyse the acceptability judgements of BE, AE and ALE speakers as far as the use of reflexive pronouns and the zero variant are concerned. The questions which will be clarified are whether a higher percentage of AE than BE speakers prefers the zero variant to the reflexive pronoun and which choice is preferred by German ALE speakers, especially in consideration of the frequent use of reflexive forms in German which could lead to the assumption of the occurrence of a transfer of some sort.

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