Missing reflexive when there's a preposition

Question

English does distinguish between a regular pronoun and a self referential one in all persons. However, it seems like the reflexive form isn't always needed.

She told him good bye and shut the door behind her.

I (not a native speaker) feel like saying "behind herself" would actually sound odd here. Here are my questions:

• Is the sentence correct without a reflexive marker?
• Would it sound wrong to use one?

If yes:

• What would happen if "she" shuts the door and there's another female in the room? How would we know who has left?

• Is there a rule to tell when one is needed? (I feel like it would be needed here: "She put the book behind herself"... sorry if that isn't idiomatic)

Answer 1

There's an exception when the reference is to location/place.

But we use personal pronouns, not reflexives, after prepositions of place...

See ngram for (behind her),(behind herself),(behind him),(behind himself)

P.S. In response to the side-exchange with Araucaria. This is too long for a comment, so I'm appending it:

As I see it, when an idiom uses a "locative" preposition, yet the meaning of the idiom has gone very far afield from a literally locative meaning, the preposition does not cease to be locative. In the German er ist zur Zeit nicht ganz auf dem Posten (~ "He's feeling under the weather") auf dem Posten still seems to function as a locative, even though the meaning of the expression is that the person is feeling ill. Same thing with "under the weather". The spatial meaning of the prepositions in those idioms has become very attenuated, to be sure, but I would still say they were locative prepositions. When we say "Don't worry, put it behind you" we don't literally mean put it in back of you. We mean "forget about it, let it go". But on some linguistic level, the locative sense is present. It seems to be a matter of degree: how attenuated the spatial meaning has become.

Answer 2

The rules about reflexives are very subtle and quite complicated. The general rule is that we need a reflexive when the pronoun occurs in the same immediate domain as another noun with the same reference. A domain is either the smallest clause that the pronoun occurs in, or a noun phrase where the determiner and another noun have the same reference.

• I gave Mary a picture of herself
• I wanted Bob to teach me.
• I taught myself.
• His description of himself ....

In the first sentence Mary and herself occur within the same clause, so we see a reflexive. In the second sentence, however although I and me are in the same larger clause, there is a smaller embedded clause headed by the verb teach. Because me is in this smaller clause but I is not, we don't need a reflexive pronoun. In the third sentence, which is there for contrast, we can see I and myself occurring in the same clause. Determiners like his and so forth do not normally count as co-referential within a domain. However, when a noun occurs in the same noun phrase as a co-referential determiner, we do need a reflexive. In the fourth example, we see the determiner his occurring in the same noun phrase as himself.

So far we have just talked about sentences where there are two words that are co-referential. We also need to think about people who may be actors in the sentence but are unexpressed - people or things that aren't represented by words. Most importantly we need to think about unexpressed subjects. Consider the following example:

• Take care of yourself!

Here, the reflexive pronoun yourself does not co-refer with any other noun. However it occurs in the same clause as the verb take and the unexpressed subject of take is you. Because yourself refers to the same entity as the subject of the verb, we need to use a reflexive here.

There are however some exceptions to the rules above. Importantly, prepositional phrases which express directions or locations occur outside the domain of a clause. It does not matter what the preposition is. It just matters whether the prepositional phrase expresses a location. Consider the following sentences:

• She kept him by her.
• She went there by herself.

In the first example, by her tells us about the location or vicinity of him. Because this is a locative expression by her falls outside of the domain of the clause. In the second sentence we also have a preposition phrase with by. However, this time the expression is not telling us about any kind of location or direction, and so we do need a reflexive pronoun here.

The Original Poster's example

• She told him good bye and shut the door behind her.

In this example she and her could be thought of as being in different clauses:

• [She told him good bye] and [shut the door behind her].

However, this is not the reason why we don't need a reflexive. The unexpressed subject of shut is still 'she'. We could think of these as being a co-ordination of verb phrases:

• She [told him good bye] and [shut the door behind her].

In this reading the actual word she is the grammatical subject of both clauses.

The reason we do not need a reflexive here is that behind her is a locative prepositional phrase and therefore falls outside of the domain of the clause. Because it is not in the same domain, we do not need a reflexive.

Answer 3

In your example, only "her" would be used, in my opinion (and in others' also), not "herself"? Why? As Poirot would phrase it, it is a matter most obscure. Several linguists have tried their hand at figuring it out, notably William Cantrall, who wrote a dissertation about it in 1969, a version of which was published as Viewpoint, Reflexives, and the Nature of Noun Phrases, Mouton & Co., The Hague 1974, 178 pp. I don't remember the theory very clearly, and I can't find much about it on line, but I do recall that the examples supporting the theory were remarkable, but the theory itself was rather odd. Whether you use a reflexive is in part determined by whose point of view you take. Very interesting, if true.

Answer 4

I'm going to answer each question in order. To the first question: No, it would be incorrect to use "her" rather than "herself". According to this Wikipedia article, whenever you're using a pronoun as an object and its antecedent is the subject of the clause, you should use the reflexive pronoun. The oblique pronoun would be incorrect.

Two: I feel that using "herself" in this sentence sounds better than using "her", but how something sounds is personal preference and should not be used to define what you actually say.

I'm going to explain the third question, even though it relies on a "yes" answer to your first question:

If "she" shuts the door behind "her", then there's another female in the room and this is not a case of unclear pronoun reference. (At least, as long as whoever is writing the sentence is using grammar exactly correctly.)

Also, like John Lawler says in his recent comment, sometimes informally you might say "Get out of here and shut the door behind you!" The understood subject is you, so if you were being perfectly grammatical, you would have to say "yourself". But speaking informally, at the very least any native speaker would understand.