English grammar innovation? New reflexive pronouns?

[David Erschler]

The Google n-gram viewer apparently shows that these forms have been around
at least since early 19th c.
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=theirselves%2C+themself&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=0

Best,
David

On Sun, Feb 13, 2011 at 7:49 PM, ROOD DAVID S <David.Rood at colorado.edu>wrote:

>
> Dear Colleagues,
>
>        In my English grammar class a few days ago my undergraduates claimed
> to have two reflexive pronouns that I have never heard before.  I wonder how
> wide-spread this is, or what other comments you might have about it.
>        The first is "themself", used for collective nouns.  The example was
> "The team really hurt themself by not cooperating more."  We're already
> ambivalent about number agreement in collectives (observe: "The team is
> playing well this year -- I hope they keep it up" with singular verb
> agreement but plural for the anaphoric pronoun), so this seems like a
> reasonable development.
>        The second is "theirselves", which for these kids, at least,
> contrasts with "themselves".  "The class taught theirselves the lesson" is
> said to mean that they got together in little groups or otherwise informally
> mixed and helped each other learn.  This is different from "The class taught
> themselves the lesson", in which each person taught him or herself, without
> cooperation, and also different from "the class taught each other the
> lesson", in which there has to be more deliberate one-to-one interaction.  I
> have no idea how to label this one.
> `       There are probably dialect differences across the Atlantic, too,
> since British speakers use plural verbs with collectives much more readily
> than we do ("the team are playing well this year" is very marginal for me,
> but easily accepted in England, I'm told).
>        Is there a new "University of Colorado undergraduate" dialect of
> English evolving, or have I just not been keeping up?  Seems like the
> contrast collective/indivduated may be expanding its grammatical effects.
>
> Best,
>        David
>
>
>
> David S. Rood
> Dept. of Linguistics
> Univ. of Colorado
> 295 UCB
> Boulder, CO 80309-0295
> USA
> rood at colorado.edu
>



-- 
Dr. David Erschler

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and

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