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  This article is an attempt to answer the following two questions, mainly the second question; a) how English self-reflexives were created, and b) why personal pronouns functioning as reflexives in OE were replaced by self-reflexives in ME. We accept the general opinion that the origin of self-reflexives is the combination of pleonastic or non-theta dative pronoun and the adjectival contrastor self. It is argued that the combining was possible due to the semantic and functional weakening, i.e. grammaticalization of the dative pronoun, not to the weakening or grammaticalization of the self part. The main function of the pleonastic dative pronoun was to ‘heighten the activities of the subject’(Keenan 2003), which overlapped the semantic function of self in most parts. So it was to grammaticalize to the unstressed, morphologically dependent, and semantically nearly vacant element. Here the loss of the adjectival endings of self was the prerequisite of the combination. Otherwise, [pron+self] would have maintained its phrasal status. The replacement of OE personal pronoun reflexives by self-forms in ME was triggered by the force to eliminate the referential ambiguity caused by the 3rd person construction such as Hei killed himi. In other words, an explicit device to indicate the coreference between the 3rd person arguments was needed, and self-forms were adopted as a new device. Therefore, self-reflexives were created in the 3rd person before the 1st and 2nd persons, ultimately causing the case-form difference between 3rd person reflexives and 1st and 2nd ones (himself vs. myself).

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