In presenting our reflections on the historical development of reflexive pronouns and intensifiers in English, we will be advocating an approach to language change that is firmly grounded in cross-linguistic, typological work. Not only does such an approach enable us to distinguish idiosyncratic, language-specific facts from pervasive regularities and the ad-hoc argument from cross-linguistic evidence, it also allows us to discuss and answer intricate questions that are unanswerable on the basis of the historical documents available for one language alone. The domain selected for this discussion is a fragment of the historical development of English, whose basic outlines are reasonably well-known (cf. Penning 1875; Farr 1905; Visser 1970; Mitchell 1985; Ogura 1989; Faiß 1989), but, on closer scrutiny, still presents a large number of unsolved puzzles and riddles. Many important questions remain unanswered and are not even raised in the relevant literature. Another reason for making this specific selection is the fact that the history of reflexives in English has received a great deal of attention by generative grammarians in recent years in connection with a discussion of Chomsky’s Binding Principles (cf. Kiparsky 1990; Keenan 1996; van Gelderen 1996, 1999, 2000). The essential problems for these generative discussions is how the distinction between ‘pronominals’(personal pronouns)

* The research on which this paper is based was supported by a grant from the DFG (Ko 497/5–2) within the Schwerpunktprogramm “Sprachtypologie”. Some of the OE examples have been taken from publications cited in the bibliography (mainly Keenan 1996 and Ogura 1989) although, for the sake of clarity, we only give the original source in the text. We would like to thank Martin Haspelmath, Brian Joseph as well as three anonymous reviewers of Diachronica for their helpful comments and suggestions.