Alleged misuse of reflexive pronouns
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Philip B. Corbett, "Me and Myself", NYT 12/22/2015:
Several readers have lamented a tendency, in The Times and elsewhere, for writers to misuse so-called reflexive pronouns — the ones that end in “-self” or “-selves.”
Mr. Corbett tells us what he thinks the rule is — more on this later — and then gives a list of five examples of (what he considers to be) mistakes from past NYT stories.
It’s a small point, but careful readers detect a lack of polish when we get this wrong. Here are a number of recent cases where reflexive pronouns were used incorrectly, all involving “like” phrases:
Ms. Syz says her clients, primarily in Europe and the United States, many of whom are art collectors like herself, find traditional jewelry too staid and appreciate her mix of haute and tongue-in-cheek style.
“Herself” is not referring to the subject of the clause (“many”); there’s no need for a reflexive pronoun here. Just say “many of whom are art collectors like her.”
Mr. Corbett's concern for "lack of polish" can be added to a list of complaints given in the entry for myself in Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, gleaned from a stack of self-appointed usage authorities "from as early as Ayres 1881 ":
… snobbish, unstylish, self-indulgent, self-conscious, old-fashioned, timorous, colloquial, informal, formal, nonstandard, incorrect, mistaken, literary, and unacceptable in formal written English.
MWDEU responds by quoting Goold Brown (from The Grammar of English Grammars): "Grammarians would perhaps differ less, if they read more."
MWDEU has this comment on the various sources that complain about alleged misuse of reflexives:
Two general statements can be made about the what these critics say concerning myself: first, they do not like it, and second, they do not know why.
In contrast, Mr. Corbett is quite precise about the reasons for his displeasure:
A reflexive pronoun is called for when the subject and object (direct or indirect) in a clause are the same person. For example, in the sentence “She chided herself for the error,” the same person is the subject of “chided” and the object. Using a regular personal pronoun — “She chided her for the error” — would indicate that the object “her” refers to someone else, not to the subject.
Reflexive pronouns can also be used for emphasis: “He will do it himself.”
But writers sometimes use a reflexive pronoun where an ordinary personal pronoun is called for — perhaps in the mistaken view that the reflexive is more formal or correct. This often occurs in prepositional phrases such as “like himself.”
But as MWDEU observes,
The handful of commentators who have done real research have found the usage surprisingly widespread in literary sources.
And dozens of examples follow. I'll give a few more examples of my own below, from thousands that could easily be found.
In the end, it's clear that Mr. Corbett's proposed rule — use a reflexive pronoun if and only if it is an object or indirect object that co-refers with the subject of the clause's main verb — is one of those plausible grammatical hypotheses that simply turns out to be a mistake. At least, for Corbett to be right, we would have to conclude that nearly all the greatest English-language writers over the past couple of hundred years have been wrong.
Indeed, the fact that allegedly wrong uses of reflexives are so common in the published stories in the NYT ought to be a clue.
This leaves open the question of what principles really do govern the use of reflexive pronouns. There's a linguistic literature on this topic, and I have my own ideas, but for now I'll leave the commenters to discuss among themselves.
Below are a few examples involving what Mr. Corbett feels to be incorrect uses of like herself. I've marked the clausal subjects in blue and the reflexives in red.
Jane Austen, Sanditon:
All that had the appearance of incongruity in the reports of the two, might very fairly be placed to the account of the vanity, the ignorance, or the blunders of the many engaged in the cause by the vigilance and caution of Miss Diana Parker. Her intimate friends must be officious like herself, and the subject had supplied letters and extracts and messages enough to make everything appear what it was not. Miss Diana probably felt a little awkward on being first obliged to admit her mistake.
Jane Austen, Emma:
They all walked about together, to see that every thing was as it should be; and within a few minutes were joined by the contents of another carriage, which Emma could not hear the sound of at first, without great surprise. "So unreasonably early!" she was going to exclaim; but she presently found that it was a family of old friends, who were coming, like herself, by particular desire, to help Mr. Weston's judgement; and they were so very closely followed by another carriage of cousins, who had been entreated to come early with the same distinguishing earnestness, on the same errand, that it seemed as if half the company might soon be collected together for the purpose of preparatory inspection.
Charlotte Brontë, The Duke of Zamorna:
Disquisitions succeeded on Mrs Young's beauty, on the splendour of the diamond ear-rings she had worn at the opera on the very night she ran away with Lord Caversham; then, lamentation about her children – her eldest daughter, who was said to be like herself, very beautiful but too frolicsome for any nurse or governess to manage; her only son, who was at school and whom his father would never allow to come home in the vacations.
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland:
Just then she heard something splashing about in the pool a little way off, and she swam nearer to make out what it was: at first she thought it must be a walrus or hippopotamus, but then she remembered how small she was now, and she soon made out that it was only a mouse that had slipped in like herself.
Henry James, Preface, The Tragic Muse:
If Nick Dormer attracts and all-indifferently holds her it is because, like herself and unlike Peter, he puts "art" first; but the most he thus does for her in the event is to let her see how she may enjoy, in intimacy, the rigour it has taught him and which he cultivates at her expense.
Henry James, The Wings of the Dove:
The handsome girl had, with herself, these felicities and crudities: it wasn't obscure to her that, without some very particular reason to help, it might have proved a test of one's philosophy not to be irritated by a mistress of millions, or whatever they were, who, as a girl, so easily might have been, like herself, only vague and cruelly female.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Kavanagh:
It was Lucy! Her bonnet and shawl were lying at her feet; and when they had passed, she waded far out into the shallow stream, laid herself gently down in its deeper waves, and floated slowly away into the moon-light, among the golden leaves that were faded and fallen like herself,—among the water-lilies, whose fragrant white blossoms had been broken off and polluted long ago. Without a struggle, without a sigh, without a sound, she floated downward, downward, and silently sank into the silent river.
Thomas Hardy, The Hand of Ethelberta:
She became teacher in a school, was praised by examiners, admired by gentlemen, not admired by gentlewomen, was touched up with accomplishments by masters who were coaxed into painstaking by her many graces rather than by her few coins, and, entering a mansion as governess to the daughter thereof, was stealthily married by the son. He, a minor like herself, died from a chill caught during the wedding tour, and a few weeks later was followed into the grave by Sir Ralph Petherwin, his unforgiving father, who had bequeathed his wealth to his wife absolutely.
George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life:
How dreary the moonlight is! robbed of all its tenderness and repose by the hard driving wind. The trees are harassed by that tossing motion, when they would like to be at rest; the shivering grass makes her quake with sympathetic cold; and the willows by the pool, bent low and white under that invisible harshness, seem agitated and helpless like herself. But she loves the scene the better for its sadness: there is some pity in it. It is not like that hard unfeeling happiness of lovers, flaunting in the eyes of misery.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter:
Such loss of faith is ever one of the saddest results of sin. Be it accepted as a proof that all was not corrupt in this poor victim of her own frailty, and man's hard law, that Hester Prynne yet struggled to believe that no fellow-mortal was guilty like herself.
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth:
The other-regarding sentiments had not been cultivated in Lily, and she was often bored by the relation of her friend's philanthropic efforts, but today her quick dramatizing fancy seized on the contrast between her own situation and that represented by some of Gerty's 'cases'. These were young girls, like herself: some perhaps pretty, some not without a trace of her finer sensibilities.
Bret Harte, Mliss: An Idyl of Red Mountain:
The idea of consulting a lawyer had seized firmly hold of the young girl's mind. There was no reason why she should select Mr. Shaw in preference to another, except she heard that he was an elderly gentleman, distinguished in his profession, who was above the meanness of stealing from a little girl like herself. The fact of his being an elderly man and the father of a family was much in his favor.
Mark Twain, The Guilded Age: A Tale of To-Day:
Did this seem like a damnable plot to Laura against the life, maybe, of a sister, a woman like herself? Probably not.
George Gordon, Lord Byron, "The Waltz: An Apostrophic Hymn":
Blest was the time Waltz chose for her début!
The Court, the Regent, like herself, were new;
Update — responding to a comment that these examples "sound a little dusty", here are some more modern quotations:
Muriel Spark, Curriculum Vitae:
The older ones were part of family groups. There were students or brides-to-be like myself. There were a few valets or lady’s maids (whose employers were up in first class).
Colin, like myself, was temporarily separated from his child by the war;
Margaret Atwood, Lady Oracle:
She had sufficient experience with the nobility to know how they looked upon women like herself, who through no fault of their own were forced to earn their own livings.
At such times, contempt for his readers and for himself hovered in the room like a cloud of smoke, and his temper after one of these sessions was foul but cold, like smog.
Ursula LeGuin, The Disposessed:
He found the workmates dull and loutish, and even those younger than himself treated him like a boy.
Masturbation was preferable, the suitable course for a man like himself.
Thomas Pynchon, V:
Subalterns, enlisted men and gangers like himself shared them out of a common pool, housed in a barbed-wire compound near the B.O.Q.
The New Yorker, "The Joy of Hating":
Mostly, people hate Duke because they win; they have more Final Four appearances than all but three other teams. “ ’Cause they jealous,” Charles Barkley, another notable heel, said last week, when I asked why fans hated players like himself and Laettner, and programs like Duke. “They don’t get mad about the worst player. They only get mad about the great player.”
The New Yorker, "Why Biden would be a serious contender":
He’s still full of energy, he’s served President Obama loyally, he loves the game, and he thinks—pundits and pollsters be damned—that this might be the moment for an old-school, shit-kicking, hand-grasping, mouth-running, stick-up-for-the-working-stiff pol like himself.
The Atlantic, "Ebola's Body Collectors":
“This was completely new for us,” writes Ballah, explaining that local Red Cross authorities like herself had to lean on their international counterparts for guidance.
The Atlantic, "Even Candy Land Isn't Safe from Sexy":
Using a different set of dolls for each question, the researchers then asked each girl to choose the doll that: looked like herself, looked how she wanted to look, was the popular girl in school, was the girl she wanted to play with
I'll also elevate from the comments one of my responses to TR, who is not convinced that the deprecated examples are "reflexive pronouns" at all:
There's a terminological question here — should all uses of PRO-self in English be called "reflexive pronouns"? The general answer seems to be "yes" — that's what CGEL does, for example.
And then there's a question of morphosyntactic analysis — how many (and which) types should we divide the uses of such pronouns into? CGEL (pp. 1483-1499) distinguishes "complement" vs. "emphatic" uses, and also "basic reflexives" vs. "overrides". "Basic" reflexives are then subdivided into those with a "single-head domain" vs. those with a "dual head domain", along with quite a bit of further taxonomizing.
A few of the examples under consideration here are "emphatic" uses in CGEL's terminology. A few more are "basic" reflexives, where the antecedent is (say) a preceding object rather than subject. But most are "override" reflexives, where "there is not the close structural relation between reflexive and antecedent that we find with basic reflexives".
The critical part of CGEL's analysis is this:
(1) "the constructions concerned admit a 1st or 2nd person reflexive with no antecedent at all";
(2) "Overrides with 3rd person reflexives characteristically occur in contexts where the antecedent refers to the person whose perspective is being taken in the discourse".
I'd add that there seem to be some cases where the antecedent is the theme of the discourse, even if that individual's perspective is not clearly being taken.
Update #2 — I'll also add a link "Clarity, choice, and evidence" (5/23/2008), which contains some discussion on "rules" as opposed to "house style", mentioned in a comment below by Roger Depledge.
TR said,
December 22, 2015 @ 12:59 pm
I'm not sure these should be called reflexive pronouns at all. Is herself in She did it herself a reflexive pronoun? I'd say it's something different — an intensive, in traditional terminology — and that these like herself cases probably fall into the same class.
[(myl) But in fact your example works just the same way that PRO-self as a direct object does:
X did it herself.
X recognized herself.
are both OK just in case herself refers to X. So yes, herself is a reflexive pronoun, in the traditional sense, in both cases — whatever further distinctions may be worth making.]
David Marjanović said,
December 22, 2015 @ 1:12 pm
What we have here is a merger. "Art collectors like herself" works beautifully if translated literally into German: Kunstsammler(inn)en wie sie selbst, with selbst for emphasis. The actual reflexive pronoun would be completely out of place: Kunstsammler(inn)en wie sich only makes sense as a dative or accusative (e.g. if preceded by "to" or by "she saw them the same way as"), and can be emphasized the same way as Kunstsammler(inn)en wie sich selbst.
For well-known historical reasons, English happens to use the same set of words for both functions.
J. W. Brewer said,
December 22, 2015 @ 1:14 pm
Mr. Corbett can always fall back on Fowler's classic response (quoted previously on LL) that "I confess to attaching more importance to my instinctive repugnance for [such-and-such construction] than to Professor _______'s demonstration that it has been said by more respectable authors than I had supposed." (The original professor who had showed that Fowler's repugnance failed to account for the actual usage of numerous respectable authors was Jespersen, so any academic ought to be proud to be swapped into the construction in his stead.)
[(myl) In this case, I don't think that Corbett's reaction starts out as a sub-rational grammatical intuition — rather, it's the result of rational internalizing of a false theory about the "correct" use of reflexive pronouns.]
David L said,
December 22, 2015 @ 2:09 pm
This is clearly a matter of style rather than grammar. I broadly agree with Corbett that if there is no particular reason to use a reflexive pronoun, the writer/editor should at least think twice about whether it adds anything to the phrasing.
As for your examples, they are all from some time ago, and to my ear sound a little dusty. I don't see why we would want a modern newspaper to sound like a 19th century novel, no matter how distinguished.
[(myl) I searched out-of-copyright (pre-1922) sources. A few more modern ones from what's on my tablet at the moment:
Muriel Spark, Curriculum Vitae:
Margaret Atwood, Lady Oracle:
Ursula LeGuin, The Disposessed:
Thomas Pynchon, V:
The New Yorker, "The Joy of Hating":
The New Yorker, "Why Biden would be a serious contender":
]
M.N. said,
December 22, 2015 @ 2:11 pm
"A mouse that had slipped in like her", in particular, sounds hilariously wrong.
Lucy Kemnitzer said,
December 22, 2015 @ 2:14 pm
My first thought was that we use the reflexive pronoun when there's a feeling that a person could be confused about which person the pronoun refers to. None of the examples provide a situation in which a person could really be confused, but a couple of them might give you a little vague feeling without the reflexive. But not all of them, so that's not sufficient to explain anything. And then I said to myself "they just sound better: it must be the rhythm:" but that was obviously nonsense. But what the examples all do is reign in a wandering point of view–they connect how something looks(for example) from the person and how it looks from elsewhere.
So that's what I think the reflexive pronoun is there for in those sentences, and I bet if you could set up a study for it, you'd find it more often in narrative writing like fiction and human interest stories and less often in other kinds of writing.
david donnell said,
December 22, 2015 @ 2:22 pm
I always suspected that the non-reflexive use of 'myself' was just a way to avoid the objective case 'me'…
EX: Could I have some cake for Julia and myself?
Because, you know, saying "Julia and me" will sound dumb to some folks, whereas "Julia and I", in this context, is actually dumb!
Surly Bartender said,
December 22, 2015 @ 2:33 pm
Never let actual widespread usage get in the way of a prescriptivist hissy-fit.
Also, once you give someone a column, even if it's in the weekly shopper, the best advice is just to try to stay out of the way of the now-omniscient monster you've created. Argument is futile.
KevinM said,
December 22, 2015 @ 2:38 pm
The Irish are way ahead of us on this one. "Himself" may be subject or object. As in "Himself will be expecting peace and quiet when he gets home." My sense from my relatives is that it is used mock-respectfully.
Uly said,
December 22, 2015 @ 2:42 pm
"A mouse that had slipped in like her", in particular, sounds hilariously wrong.
Bet you a dollar that it's "supposed" to be "a mouse that had slipped in like she had".
As for your examples, they are all from some time ago, and to my ear sound a little dusty. I don't see why we would want a modern newspaper to sound like a 19th century novel, no matter how distinguished.
Well, to each their own. These examples all sound fine to me, but “many of whom are art collectors like her" sounds a little odd.
Rachael said,
December 22, 2015 @ 3:23 pm
I have no problem with "like herself", but something that does bother me (and which might have been the source of some of the readers' complaints) is the tendency of people working in customer service to use reflexive pronouns all over the place, like "Please return the form to myself" or "We will send the invoice to yourself".
BobW said,
December 22, 2015 @ 4:32 pm
@KevinM – Is that KevinMself?
TR said,
December 22, 2015 @ 5:46 pm
MYL, are you arguing that all of what are traditionally called "intensive" -self forms are really reflexive? If "reflexive" means "co-referring with the subject", this is certainly not true for e.g. I met the Queen herself. I would call that an intensive, not a reflexive, herself, and would be inclined to say the same for both She did it herself and your like herself examples.
[(myl) At least I'm arguing that "co-referring with the subject" is not the right way to define any of the natural classes involved. And the cases where Corbett says that "relative pronouns were used incorrectly" — because they didn't co-refer with the subject — are in fact all perfectly correct and idiomatic English. Whether there's more than one type of X-self usage is another question.]
Stephen Hart said,
December 22, 2015 @ 5:51 pm
In interviews, I hear scientists frequently saying something like "My colleagues and myself published on that topic in 2012."
Ellen K. said,
December 22, 2015 @ 6:23 pm
Seem to me "lack of polish" indicates it's an issue of register, rather than something being fully ungrammatical. To me, Corbett's suggestion of "like her" sounds wrong. Then again, I'm not the polished sort. Educated, yes, polished, not so much. I imagine I'd write "many of who are art collectors like she is". "Like herself" is for me unremarkable, but I'm not sure if I would use it or not. I did have to read twice to even notice it, though, in the original example.
Daniel Barkalow said,
December 22, 2015 @ 6:24 pm
Surely he'd accept cases where the reflexive is clearly an object of a preposition, rather than an direct or indirect object of the verb in a clause. He could probably even find examples in columns by *him.
Rubrick said,
December 22, 2015 @ 6:46 pm
It seems one function of the reflexive is to highlight an implicit comparison between the referent and other, hypothetical persons (or things). At least I think that's what's going on in constructions like "I, myself, have been known to frequent brothels now and again."
TR said,
December 22, 2015 @ 7:44 pm
At least I'm arguing that "co-referring with the subject" is not the right way to define any of the natural classes involved.
Why not? The traditional (i.e. Latin-based) account is that there are reflexive pronouns (defined as co-referring with the subject, e.g. Latin se) and intensive pronouns (not necessarily co-referring, e.g. Latin ipse), and that English happens to conflate the two morphologically. The alternative would be to say there's just one category of -self pronouns in English, and try to come up with a unified account of their functions, but it's not clear to me what such an account might look like.
Guy said,
December 22, 2015 @ 10:19 pm
Corbett not only fails to diagnose where reflexives are permissible, but also where they are mandatory: I took a picture of myself but *I took a picture of me. The pronoun here is not an object, and so the latter should be called for by his rule.
chh said,
December 22, 2015 @ 10:20 pm
@TR
The instances of 'himself', 'herself', etc. that Corbett is complaining about aren't cases where 'ipse' would have been used in Latin though. They're reflexive pronouns; they just don't fit the narrow sort of definition Corbett mistakenly has in mind.
Guy said,
December 22, 2015 @ 10:22 pm
It is not an object of the clause, I should say. I wish there were an edit function here.
TR said,
December 22, 2015 @ 11:25 pm
@chh The instances of 'himself', 'herself', etc. that Corbett is complaining about aren't cases where 'ipse' would have been used in Latin though.
I think several of the examples in the post would work with ipse (or Greek αὐτός, or German selbst as David M. points out). Most of them would not work with se without syntactic recasting, since se has no nominative forms. It's hard to see how some of these pronouns can be called reflexive when they don't co-refer with either the immediate subject or anything else in the sentence at all (e.g. "Colin, like myself, was temporarily separated from his child by the war").
[(myl) But pronouns in general don't always need to have an antecedent in the same clause, or the same sentence, or even an explicit antecedent at all.
There's a terminological question here — should all uses of PRO-self in English be called "reflexive pronouns"? The general answer seems to be "yes" — that's what CGEL does, for example.
And then there's a question of morphosyntactic analysis — how many (and which) types should we divide the uses of such pronouns into? CGEL (pp. 1483-1499) distinguishes "complement" vs. "emphatic" uses, and also "basic reflexives" vs. "overrides". "Basic" reflexives are then subdivided into those with a "single-head domain" vs. those with a "dual head domain", along with quite a bit of further taxonomizing.
A few of the examples under consideration here are "emphatic" uses in CGEL's terminology. A few more are "basic" reflexives, where the antecedent is (say) a preceding object rather than subject. But most are "override" reflexives, where "there is not the close structural relation between reflexive and antecedent that we find with basic reflexives".
The critical part of CGEL's analysis is this:
(1) "the constructions concerned admit a 1st or 2nd person reflexive with no antecedent at all";
(2) "Overrides with 3rd person reflexives characteristically occur in contexts where the antecedent refers to the person whose perspective is being taken in the discourse".
I'd add that there seem to be some cases where the antecedent is the theme of the discourse, even if their perspective is not clearly being taken.]
chh said,
December 23, 2015 @ 12:01 am
@TR
Ah- I didn't pay attention to a lot of the examples in what Corbett wrote. I'm not familiar with work on those "Colin, like myself…" cases, so don't have a clue how people approach that!
I think you wind up with the dative form 'sibi' in the Latin equivalents of a lot of these sentences, since you'd have something like 'sibi simile', right? We don't use 'myself' in English where nominative case would be assigned either.
Y said,
December 23, 2015 @ 1:12 am
In some of the 3rd person examples you have (himself/herself), are by a person thinking (or speaking) of themselves ("then she remembered how small she was now, and she soon made out that it was only a mouse that had slipped in like herself.")
In others, the -self pronoun distinguishes the referent from a secondary 3rd person, the way some languages distinguish a proximate and obviative 3rd person ("her eldest daughter, who was said to be like herself").
TR said,
December 23, 2015 @ 3:20 am
@chh I think you wind up with the dative form 'sibi' in the Latin equivalents of a lot of these sentences, since you'd have something like 'sibi simile', right?
That's what I meant by syntactic recasting — simile is an adjective, so this is a different construction. In any case sibi would only be possible in subject-coreferential uses, which many of these aren't. A closer construction to the English would be something like sicut (ea) ipsa (in the case and gender needed), which, if not particularly idiomatic, would at least be grammatical in all these cases, I believe.
Roger Depledge said,
December 23, 2015 @ 5:36 am
Corbett's error, of course, lies in arguing his case.
I see that he is associate managing editor for standards, and also in charge of The Times’s style manual. As a contributor to Language Log put it so memorably in May 2008,
[(myl) Indeed. But my impression is that the people who manage style manuals can rarely resist "arguing their case", at least when the issue is vaguely grammatical or lexicographical. It's rare to see explanations of the form "X and Y are both standard options, but here we use only X". Rather, the attitude is usually "Y is a common error — we know better, and so we insist on X".]
Mr Punch said,
December 23, 2015 @ 9:43 am
In most of the literary examples, as in Corbett's own, the reflexive serves as a reminder that the writer (narrator, journalist) has entered the consciousness of (or is paraphrasing) the subject. This is done for the sake of clarity; it is a variant of "emphasis," of which Corbett approves.
[(myl) As CGEL puts it, "Overrides with 3rd person reflexives characteristically occur in contexts where the antecedent refers to the person whose perspective is being taken in the discourse". But I don't think that this has anything to do with "emphasis", at least not in the sense of examples like "Kim herself".]
Mark P said,
December 23, 2015 @ 11:26 am
Corbett is just saying what he wishes were true, because it would make so much sense if only it were. I'm sure he and others like himself could come up with a much better language than the one we actually have.
KevinM said,
December 23, 2015 @ 11:42 am
@TR re "the Queen herself." In certain specialties, "himself" and "herself" can rise above mere emphasis and become an obligatory epithet: e.g., those seminal thinkers,"Freudhimself" and "Marxhimself."
P.S. chh's statements about "ipse" are just his own say-so? How ironic.
@BobW – actually, KevinMcSelf.
Jerry Friedman said,
December 23, 2015 @ 11:55 am
Uly:
"'A mouse that had slipped in like her', in particular, sounds hilariously wrong.
"Bet you a dollar that it's 'supposed' to be 'a mouse that had slipped in like she had'."
Carroll would have written "as she had". There are no instances of "like" used that way in The Complete Illustrated Lewis Carroll. (I checked "I", "he", "we", and "they" as well as "she".)
"A mouse that had slipped in like her" sounds better than "a mouse that had slipped in like herself" to me, but "a mouse that had slipped in as she had" sounds the best.
The CGEL's criterion on perspective is new to me and interesting, but it doesn't account for all of Prof. Liberman's examples, such as the ones from Brontë, Longfellow, and Hardy.
[(myl) It depends on what we mean by "perspective" — but that's why I suggested that "there seem to be some cases where the antecedent is the theme of the discourse, even if that individual's perspective is not clearly being taken".]
Another question is whether there's a distinction between the -self pronouns and the others when the passage is from the perspective of the person the pronoun applies to. To take my favorite writer of those quoted,
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind
Could that have been "like himself"? Would there have been a difference?
DWalker said,
December 23, 2015 @ 12:23 pm
I just wish people would stop saying "If you have any questions, please contact Bill or myself". Ugh.
TR said,
December 23, 2015 @ 12:32 pm
Thanks for the summary of CGEL's analysis, MYL. I still feel it's more sensible to use "reflexive" as a term with a cross-linguistically definable meaning than as just a label for all the English pronouns that end in -self, but that's largely a terminological point.
Rodger C said,
December 23, 2015 @ 12:55 pm
@KevinM: Freudhimself, Marxhimself, and, in some quarters, Guénonhimself.
Guy said,
December 23, 2015 @ 2:32 pm
TR
The thing about cross-linguistic syntactic (as opposed to semantic) terminology is that it needs to adapt to the language under discussion. For example, "count noun" is a useful cross-linguistic term, but when talking about English or Russian, we don't care if something is a count noun in Latin. Likewise, "auxiliary verb" is often understood to refer to a special closed class of English verbs with special English-specific properties, there exist other English "lexical verbs" that have some features in common with "auxiliary verbs" from other languages but we don't let that govern.
For example, English is widely accepted to have no future tense, and your approach is a little bit like insisting that not only does English have a future tense, but "will" is only a marker of future tense when it is used in a way similar to the future tenses of other languages. E.g. "I'll come by tomorrow" – future tense, but "this stupid door won't open" – not future tense. But that's not a useful way of classifying a syntactic feature like tense.
Orin Hargraves said,
December 23, 2015 @ 2:51 pm
Here are some other cases that are difficult to account for by the usual understanding of what governs the reflexive (some courtesy of Laura Michaelis). Overrides? I think the preposition forces the form of the pronoun in most of these:
1. I’ve put that incident behind me (*myself).
2. She had no money on her (*herself).
3. You can’t take it with you (*yourself).
4. We have a long journey ahead of us (*ourselves).
5. I don’t have it with me (*myself).
6. She takes a lot on herself (*her).
7. He needs to get over himself (*him).
8. I brought this on myself (*me).
9. I got ahead of myself (*me).
10. I looked around me/myself and saw…
And there's "Now I lay me down to sleep," which is grammatically objectionable, but metrically flawless.
TR said,
December 23, 2015 @ 5:25 pm
@Guy, I take your point, but in this case no one denies that English has pronouns that are reflexive in the usual syntactico-semantically definable sense, as in He looked at himself in the mirror; the question is whether it makes sense to also call the pronoun in I met the queen herself reflexive because it shares the same form. Unless there's a good unitary analysis of both usages (and maybe someone's produced one, I don't know), I would say no. An analogy would be the forms in -ing, where many people would say that e.g. I am reading; Reading is fun; I walked down the street reading represent three different categories with the same morphological exponent, because it's hard to unify them analytically.
[(myl) An interesting point. In fact, CGEL decides (after extensive discussion) to collapse all English -ing forms into a single category called "gerund-participle" (see e.g. pp. 80-83). Part of the reasoning (p. 82, under the heading "A distinction between gerund and present participle can't be sustained"):
Historically, the gerund and present participle of traditional grammar have different sources, but in Modern English the forms are identical No verb shows any difference in form […], not even be. […] We have therefore just one inflectional form of the verb marked by the -ing suffix; we label it with the compound term 'gerund-participle for the verb-form, as there is not reason to give priority to one of other of the traditional terms.
This is not quite accurate for those speakers in the American South who still systematically distinguish gerunds in [+ɪŋ] from present participles in [+ɪn]; but …]
Guy said,
December 23, 2015 @ 6:13 pm
From the examples you give, it seems to me that the first and third are easily unified, similar to "I am happy" and "I walked down the street happy", although the progressive aspect still merits special consideration as a construction even if it uses the same verb form as other constructions. I think it's true that the use of a reflexive pronoun as an adjunct with a meaning similar to "personally" is a fairly distinct use from the others, but that doesn't stop them from being reflexive anymore than the use of genitives as subjects of certain gerund-participial clauses in English makes them not be genitives (as in "I suggested he ask you for help in light of your being an expert in the subject"). But even if we do segregate that use out as using a different kind of pronoun, as well as other uses like those licensed by coordinations, we still have reflexives showing up in various syntactic positions (inside adjuncts and noun-phrases and other constituents) that don't fit simplistic accounts like Corbett's but are still based on notions of "two coreferential constituents in close syntactic relation". And not all of these cases will necessarily have direct analogues in other languages with reflexive pronouns.
J. W. Brewer said,
December 23, 2015 @ 8:02 pm
FWIW the google n-gram viewer shows "lay/laid me down" to be consistently more frequent over time than "lay/laid myself down." Think of it as a fixed idiom (and as such not accounted for by the usual rules), if you like, but it's too common to be grammatically objectionable.
J. W. Brewer said,
December 23, 2015 @ 8:07 pm
Note that in Stevenson's "Glad did l live and gladly die / And l laid me down with a will," swapping in "myself" would work equally well and perhaps better (LAID my-self DOWN with-a WILL), in terms of the rhythm of the line. But it would sound less idiomatic. Or at least that's my ear's opinion.
Rodger C said,
December 24, 2015 @ 12:58 pm
To me, LAID ME DOWN witha WILL expresses more, well, will.
TR said,
December 25, 2015 @ 2:31 pm
So following the CGEL approach, maybe we should call -self words "reflexive-intensive"?
Jenny said,
December 27, 2015 @ 1:50 am
I agree with Lucy Kemnitzer. In these examples, the reflexive pronouns make it clear that the observation or comparison is from the point of view of a particular person.
These sentences would be natural for me to say, but reversing "him" and "himself" would seem odd to me, and I think it is because of the point of view. It might be the tense, though.
"Kim understood that cat-lovers like himself had to put up with shed fur."
"Kim and cat-lovers like him understand that they have to put up with shed fur."
To use an example from above, I would replace "herself" with "her" in a slightly different sentence.
“This was completely new for us,” writes Ballah, explaining that local Red Cross authorities like herself had to lean on their international counterparts for guidance.
“This was completely new for us,” writes Ballah. Local Red Cross authorities like her have to lean on their international counterparts for guidance.
KevinM said,
December 28, 2015 @ 2:24 pm
@RodgerC "[I] laid me down with a will" does sound more willful. I think it's because it posits an "I" that is acting upon a "me," like one person overbearing another. That is, it adopts the usual [subject] laid [object] down, but violates an expectation.
Alexander St.John said,
December 31, 2015 @ 7:44 am
Q: Can a verb be called reflexive even if as it happens in English that we omit the rflexive pronoun?
I mean, a verb like concentrate is reflexive in French and German so isn't just that English omits the pronoun to an otherwise reflexive verb?
your thoughts