Thyself - Non-reflexive Usage in English

Non-reflexive Usage in English

It is increasingly common to use reflexive pronouns without local linguistic antecedents to refer to discourse participants or people already referenced in a discourse: for example, "Please, forward the information to myself." Such formulations are usually considered non-standard and incorrect. These can often be found within text where the writer has tried to formulate a more professional looking letter without a true understanding of the language they are using. Within the linguistics literature, reflexives with discourse antecedents are often referred to as logophors. Standard English does allow the use of logophors in some contexts: for example, "John was angry. Embarrassing pictures of himself were on display." However, within Standard English, this logophoric use of reflexives is generally limited to positions where the reflexive does not have a coargument. The newer non-standard usage does not respect this limitation. In some cases, reflexives without local antecedents may be better analyzed as emphatic pronouns without any true reflexive sense.

It is common in some subsets of the English-speaking population to use standard object pronouns to express reflexive relations, especially in the first and sometimes second persons, and especially for a recipient: for example, "I want to get me some supper." This usage is non-standard.

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