Re: long-distance reflexives in Spanish?

mb wrote:

Fwiw, the analogous usage of portuguese 'si' also seems to sound wrong.
When it appears, it refers to the polite 2nd person: _disse-me para
ficar junto de si_ 'told me to stay close to (polite-)you'.

Even that use looks exceptional for Romances, probably because of the
need to avoid the ambiguity due to the absence of a designated pronoun
for the polite 3rd person (like Lei, Usted, Ella, etc.). Are the only
words that can replace that "si" in that sentence nouns like "a
senhora, o senhor", etc., or is there an alternative pronoun?

You can use "a senhora, o senhor" (doutor, professor, any treatment that is somewhat reverencial, but not a merely professional one), you can use 'voce^' (which may or may not be considerde rude), but the usual form is really 'si'. Also _disse-me para vir falar consigo_ 'told me to come talk to you' (which again accepts _com + noun_, but not _com voce^_, which I think isn't possible vene in Brazil - _voce^_/_voce^s_ took over the 2nd person there, but the pronouns are still the old ones (what I mean is that they're still 2nd person, whereas voce/voces take a 3rd person verbal inflection):

PT singular tu teu contigo
PT polite [rev.] seu consigo / com [rev.]
PT plural voces vosso convosco / com voces

BR singular voce seu consigo
BR polite [rev.] de [rev.] com [rev.]
BR plural voces vosso com voces

A [rev.] form seems mandatory whenever the otherwise expected form could be the 'non-polite' one; e.g., BR pol. uses _de [rev.]_ ('do senhor', for instance) since _seu_ would be the normal singular, whereas PT uses _seu_ for the polites, since the normal is _teu_ (rather, since _seu_ can't be anything else, with the exception of the normal 3rd person, which is put aside by context).
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