The Social Meaning of Unbound Reflexives

This paper contributes to the growing interest in the social meaning of syntactic variation (Moore 2021) by investigating the social meaning of unbound reflexives (e.g. "Amber and myself are the logical next leaders"). Unbound reflexives are socially marked in syntactic contexts where the nominative or accusative pronoun are possible alternatives. I demonstrate, based on observational data and a survey-style experiment, that unbound reflexives are associated with professionalism and used to perform professional-like personae. I argue that the unbound reflexive directly indexes meanings like objective, legitimate, credible, and serious, which are indirectly indexical of professionalism (Ochs 1993). Analysis of metalinguistic commentary demonstrates that this is an enregistered feature associated with a formal and professional genre of speech. Furthermore, I analyze the prescriptive and classist ideologies that arise in the metalinguistic commentary and how these ideologies reveal a perception of this register as involving excessive effort and concealed intentions (Acton 2022).