I’ve mentioned my fondness for compiling historical grammatical errors as a reminder that we are not, point of fact, destroying what used to be a perfect language. Previously, I’d found unnecessary quotation marks in a 1960 World Series celebration, it’s for its in a 1984 John Mellencamp video, and an apostrophe incorrectly marking a plural in a famous 1856 editorial cartoon. But these were all punctuation-based errors. Today’s is a proper grammatical error, and one that people full-throatedly bemoan nowadays.
I found this error by admitting to myself that I am secretly an old man, and coming to terms with it by spending much of the summer sitting in parks, reading books on naval history and international relations. One of them, Nathaniel Philbrick’s Sea of Glory, tells the story of the U.S. Exploring Expedition, who discovered Antarctica and created the country’s first accurate naval charts for the Pacific islands. It’s a good book, but then it turned great by having two interesting old quotes four pages apart.
In the first, the Expedition is approaching Fiji and takes on another pilot due to the many coral reefs in the area:
“Wilkes felt it necessary to secure yet another experienced pilot at Tonga named Tom Granby. ‘You will find when we get to the Islands,’ Wilkes assured Granby, ‘that I know as much about them as you do.’ Granby smiled. ‘You may know all about them on paper,’ he replied, ‘but when you come to the goings in and goings out, you will see who knows best, you or myself.'”
Myself here is clearly non-standard, as no first-person pronoun has appeared anywhere in the sentence. The standard rule for reflexives, known as Principle A in Government and Binding theory, and discussed in pretty much every introductory syntax class, is that a reflexive must be bound in its governing category. Or, to say it in a more theory-agnostic and somewhat looser way, the coreferent of the reflexive (I/me for myself) has to appear within the smallest clause that contains the reflexive, and structurally “above” the reflexive. The syntactic specifics they depend on which syntactic theory you’re adhering to, but luckily they don’t really matter here; there’s no possible coreferent anywhere within the sentence, so any standard definition of Principle A will label the sentence ungrammatical.
Turning from this syntactic jungle to the Fijian jungle, a few pages later the Expedition lands on an island and hikes to its peak:
“Almost two years at sea had left them ill-prepared for such a demanding hike. ‘I have seldom witnessed a party so helpless as ourselves appeared,’ Wilkes wrote, ‘in comparison with the natives and white residents, who ran over the rocks like goats.'”
Again, it’s obvious that this is a non-standard usage, since no first-person plural noun phrase appears in the sentence to justify the reflexive.
Now, I’ve been marking these as non-standard rather than incorrect, and there’s a reason for this that is more than a desire to be non-judgmental. These supposedly erroneous uses of reflexives are widespread — so much so that I’d argue they’re at least borderline acceptable in many people’s forms of Informal Spoken English. That means that they ought to be explainable, that there ought to be some option in the rules of English that allow you to consider these uses acceptable without having to change much else in the language. I’m going to speculate for the rest of this post, so feel free to bail out here.
But before you bail, let me just brag about where I get to read.
Here’s my idea, which I don’t think is novel.* Reflexives are allowed only when, in some sense, there’s a sufficiently salient coreferent for the reflexive. Salience is standardly assessed syntactically, meaning that a coreferent appears structurally above the reflexive, and close enough to remain salient when the reflexive appears. But there is pragmatic salience as well, for people and things who haven’t been explicitly mentioned but remain prominent in the discourse all the same. And what is more pragmatically salient than the speaker? In both of these cases, it seems that the speaker is thinking of themselves as sufficiently salient to trigger the reflexive.
My intuition is that there are more instances of inappropriate reflexives for first person (myself, ourselves) than second person (yourself), and more of either than for third person (himself, herself, itself, themselves). I did a quick corpus search on COCA for sentence-initial As for *self, and the intuition wasn’t fully borne out; as for myself was the most common, but combined as for him/herself showed up almost as often (64 to 60), and as for yourself only registered one instance. So maybe I’m totally off-base on the specifics.** But something is going on that allows so many people to view reflexives as standard in positions that we don’t expect to see them, and like this or not, that needs explained.
—
*: If you know of any references to discussions about this issue, please share. I’m not primarily a syntactician, and didn’t see anything in a cursory search of the literature, but I really doubt this discussion hasn’t been had before.
**: I think the as for *self construction may be a special case. Most of the third-person uses look to be about how some third party views themself, and while one can state one’s own introspections and speculate about a third party’s, it’s a little bit weird to tell someone their own introspections. That could artificially deflate the second-person counts.
I think the best explanation of this construction may be as an indicator that we are switching mental spaces, if you’re familiar with that theory. Saying as for Xself establishes a new mental space focused on X and their inner workings or opinions, rather than the more generic mental space of the rest of the conversation. Sorry, I’m really going down a rabbit hole here.
15 comments
Comments feed for this article
October 2, 2012 at 2:03 pm
Nita
I believe I’ve read many examples of the second usage in old books. “As ourselves appeared” sounds quite normal, so that I wouldn’t take note of it. I don’t know anything about Principle A, but the first definition for “ourselves” in the Oxford English dictionary seems to me to justify this use.
October 3, 2012 at 8:32 am
Marc Leavitt
Rather than adhere to linguistic rules, I would consider this stylistically. In the first sentence, the pronoun adds emphasis to the importance of the presumed actions of the speaker, and in the second quotation, inclusively, to both actors.
That said, it smacks of Hiberno-English, and presuming the author writes for a wider audience, distracts from the narrative’s subject.
October 3, 2012 at 2:00 pm
John Cowan
Some uses of -self are emphatic rather than normally reflexive, and it may be that as for myself should be understood as a variant of as for me myself. However, in your two main instances, there is a natural hesitation between subject and object pronouns: should we write so helpless as us, treating as as a preposition, or so helpless as we, understanding we as elliptical for we were? Using ourselves instead evades this dilemma. Similarly, who knows best, you or I? is traditionally and prescriptively correct, but you or me sounds more natural; myself again slips between the horns.
October 3, 2012 at 2:10 pm
Warsaw Will
As a layman, I got a bit lost in the Principle A argument, and I may have misunderstood, but as far as I can see this is dealt with at some length in MWDEU – http://books.google.com/books?id=2yJusP0vrdgC&pg=PA647, including a quote from Shakespeare – Myself hath often heard them say – and others from the likes of Jane Austen; I think the one I like best is from Emily Dickinson – Somehow myself survived the night.
They don’t come up with a theory to explain it, of course, but there is a bit of a discussion of how it fits in with discourse analysis at the end.
October 3, 2012 at 3:20 pm
Ado_Annie
Couldn’t help but think of the painful, non-standard English use of a reflexive at the beginning of A Few Good Men where Demi Moore’s character asks for assignment to a case, “In short, Captain, I’d like to suggest that I be the one who that… that it be me who is assigned to represent them… myself.”
October 4, 2012 at 8:17 am
Mar Rojo
Crystal touches on it here:
” Usages such as Jane and myself went to the cinema and They saw John and myself in the street are on the increase – an ancient usage, which remained alive only in a few regional varieties, notably Irish English, but which is widespread in British English now. (And outside of Britain? Comments, please.) So expect to see more examples of this in the next generation of book and film titles. We’ve already had Oscar Wilde and Myself, My Father and Myself, and a few others. If they ever remake the cult film, and feel the need to retitle, it could be Withnail and Myself. >”
http://david-crystal.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/on-marley-and-mei.html
October 5, 2012 at 7:05 am
This Week’s Language Blog Roundup: Banned Books Week, grammar wars, and more | Wordnik
[…] Liz Potter gave us some tips on maybe versus perhaps. Meanwhile, Motivated Grammar declared that misuses of myself and yourself are nothing […]
October 5, 2012 at 9:56 am
Dan M.
I think any attempt to count instances of “*self”, in an attempt to find uses that you’re calling non-standard here, is going to find “his/herself” substantially more frequent than “yourself” for the simple fact that the standard use, in which “-self” disambiguates whether another pronoun has the same or a different referent, there is almost never need to distinguish between two “you”s, thus making standard “him/herself” vastly more common.
October 7, 2012 at 3:51 pm
goofy
Is this really nonstandard? MWDEU has a long list of examples from well-regarded writers. The examples include conjoined pronouns, one of which is “self”, appositive use (like Gabe’s first example), object of a verb, and object of a preposition. The only place it’s not found is as the sole subject.
October 8, 2012 at 7:39 am
ProsWrite
Here’s one explanation, resurrected from a source read during my grad school days: Parker, RIley & Meyer (1990) “Untriggered reflexive pronouns in English” American Speech, 65(1), 50-69.
First, URs [untriggered reflexives] that are unacceptable as single NPs gain acceptability in coordinate NPs, as illustrated by sentences like: *Myself/several of the employees and the myself wrote to the chairman. This phenomenon is explained if we assume that NP node dominating a coordinate NP serves as a barrier to government, thereby blocking normal rules of case assignment. Thus, where we would expect to find, say, only objective case (e.g., me), we find both nominative and reflexive forms as well (e.g., I and myself). In such constructions, DRs seem to be alternative forms of personal pronouns rather than true anaphors.
Second, URs that are unacceptable in single NPs become acceptable in postgeneric NPs, as exemplified by There are groups for ?yourself/people like yourself: This phenomenon is explained if we assume that a single reflexive subject has no c-commanding argument and thus cannot be properly bound. On the other hand, the object of a postgeneric PP does have a c-commanding argument and CAN be properly bound. In such constructions, reflexives are not actually “untriggered” at all, but, rather, have the properties of true anaphors.
Third, URs can supplant the corresponding personal pronouns even outside of coordinate structures and postgeneric PPs, as shown by sentences like: This is a photograph of me/myself. This phenomenon reflects the different discourse functions of personal and reflexive pronouns: personal pronouns have an exophoric function and identify a discourse participant, while reflexive pronouns have an anaphoric function and identify a discourse referent.
Finally, first and second person URs are relatively more acceptable than third person URs, as exemplified by sentences like: This is a photograph of myself/yourself/?himself. These judgments are explained once we recognize that only first and second person pronouns can refer to discourse participants. Thus, the distinction between third person personal pronouns and URs serves no discourse function, since third person pronouns necessarily identify a discourse referent.
October 8, 2012 at 9:03 am
Dan M.
Is there any quick-and-dirty paraphrase of “c-commanding argument” that would make this understandable to a layman?
October 8, 2012 at 1:44 pm
Shanster
When translating a German text, I came across an intensifying reflexive pronoun, like “ich selbst” or it may have been “ich selber”, and I didn’t want to translate it “I, myself” because I just don’t like the sound of it in English. I know it’s perfectly fine, but I still used some convoluted construction to avoid it. I, myself, feel that this construction is redundantly redundant.
November 15, 2012 at 11:02 am
ambermartingale
Interesting.
March 21, 2013 at 9:39 pm
David L. Gold
Since emphatic use of English “self” is recorded for as early as the mid ninth century (see the entry for “myself” in The Oxford English Dictionary), the Dutch cognate of that morpheme (zelf) is likewise used emphatically (as in “wat kan ik zelf doen?” ‘what can I myself do?’), as are the German cognate (selbst), as in “du hast es selbst gesagt” ‘you said so yourself, you yourself said so’ (see Shanster’s comment of 8 October 2012), and the Swedish one (själv), as in “hur är det med dig själv?” ‘how’s yourself?’, this could well be a usage of Proto-Germanic origin. In any case, our feeling that certain uses of emphatic “self” are now nonstandard (“I’m fine. How’s yourself?”) might be the result of certain prescriptivists’ successfully though unjustifiedly hammering into generation after generation of school children the notion that such uses are wrong.
March 29, 2013 at 1:27 pm
Dana Cohen
There’s a wide range of reflexives that cannot be accounted for by Binding A, and a wide range of literature to try and account for them. The examples here are not emphatic, but referential. The terms you’re looking for are logophoricity, point of view reflexives and long distance reflexives. For some intro and discussion of some of the literature, see Reuland, E. (2007) Logophoricity, in The Blackwell Companion to Syntax (eds M. Everaert and H. van Riemsdijk), Blackwell Publishing.