Timeline for Missing reflexive when there's a preposition
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
7 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jan 28, 2015 at 10:28 | comment | added | Emanuel | @Araucaria... I think in the last sentence you meant grammati...oh wait, I got it. | |
| Jan 28, 2015 at 10:01 | comment | added | Araucaria - Him | If you're a native speaker - and I guess you are - you don't need to look up something to see if it's grammatical or not. Your brain's has in built grammar extpertise. If someone says something with bad grammars, you'll be able to tell straights away. (Did you see what I did there?). So, unless it feels like someone's bashing your natural grammar ear by a saucepan, the grammar's fine. In the Original Poster's example, we don't have that kind of problem - which shows that the example's grammatically! :-) | |
| Jan 27, 2015 at 21:50 | comment | added | Jonathan Spirit | @Emanuel First person would be spoken from the perspective of a person. In fact, you could say that an entire book written in first person is dialogue, just without the tags. So it would be subject to the mannerisms of the speaker. But like you say, that suggests that not using the reflexive isn't necessarily informal. Maybe there is in fact an exception like TRomano says. | |
| Jan 27, 2015 at 21:27 | comment | added | Emanuel | Here's another search result I found while I was trying to find something false about the other answer: google.de/… | |
| Jan 27, 2015 at 21:23 | comment | added | Emanuel | Here's the link google.de/… Logically speaking all these should be "myself". So, do the rules only apply to third person? | |
| Jan 27, 2015 at 21:22 | comment | added | Emanuel | First of, thanks for your answer!! I've ran a few Google searches for phrases like "he * behind him". Since the results of those are a mix of correct and "false" obliques I then tried "I * behind me". That gives a whole lot of results. Among the main hits is a famous folk song so I excluded the word "girl" from the search. Still a lot of results, some from the King James Bible. That suggests that not using the reflexive is not a result of sloppy modern day colloquial speech. Finally I looked for "I looked behind me" on Google Books and got 107.000 hits. | |
| Jan 27, 2015 at 20:14 | history | answered | Jonathan Spirit | CC BY-SA 3.0 |