Timeline for Missing reflexive when there's a preposition
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
14 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jan 28, 2015 at 16:20 | comment | added | John Lawler | Find more examples and maybe you can argue for a semantic cause. But correlation is not causation. | |
| Jan 28, 2015 at 16:05 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/#!/StackEnglish/status/560468628152537089 | ||
| Jan 28, 2015 at 13:18 | answer | added | Araucaria - Him | timeline score: 4 | |
| Jan 28, 2015 at 9:55 | comment | added | Araucaria - Him | @JohnLawler The exception's because of the locative preposition, ain't it? | |
| Jan 28, 2015 at 9:45 | vote | accept | Emanuel | ||
| Jan 27, 2015 at 21:55 | answer | added | Greg Lee | timeline score: 3 | |
| Jan 27, 2015 at 20:21 | answer | added | TimR | timeline score: 3 | |
| Jan 27, 2015 at 20:14 | answer | added | Jonathan Spirit | timeline score: 2 | |
| Jan 27, 2015 at 20:11 | comment | added | John Lawler |
In general, that's the reflexive rule. But fixed phrases like shut the door behind X typically don't require reflexives with a coreferential subject: Get out of here and shut the door behind you/*him. The subject is clearly you (understood), but a reflexive is not normally used, and may sound overly formal for an angry context. Think of this as an exception to the reflexive rule, generated by idiom.
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| Jan 27, 2015 at 20:02 | comment | added | Jonathan Spirit | Style books are no help. Instead I looked to Wikipedia, which states that reflexive pronouns should be used when the pronoun's antecedent is the subject of the clause. So, in response to your first two questions: the sentence is incorrect without the reflexive pronoun, because the pronoun's antecedent is the subject of the sentence. I as a native speaker would personally use "herself" as I think it sounds better. I'll answer all four questions in an answer. | |
| Jan 27, 2015 at 19:50 | comment | added | Jonathan Spirit | That's a very valid comment. I'll do some research in style books to find out. | |
| Jan 27, 2015 at 19:47 | comment | added | Emanuel | @JonathanSpirit... but wouldn't that mean that I can say "She washes her." and rely on context to clear up the rest? Why is the reflexive mandatory here but not in the other case? | |
| Jan 27, 2015 at 19:46 | comment | added | Jonathan Spirit | "Her" is an objective pronoun. Thinking of the sentence syntactically, "her" is absolutely correct. "Herself" is also an objective pronoun, and I believe reflexive pronouns are just possible replacements for the main objective pronoun. Remember also that "herself" can be extrapolated to "her self", so you're literally saying that she shut the door behind the self owned by her, which is just as right, just with a noun instead of a pronoun. | |
| Jan 27, 2015 at 19:40 | history | asked | Emanuel | CC BY-SA 3.0 |