non-reflexive "myself"

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Aug 26, 2006, at 6:34 AM, Ben Zimmer wrote:

> See Safire's Sunday column for his reflexions on non-reflexive
> "myself/yourself" (which he speculates is influenced by Irish-American
> nominal "Himself")...

safire makes the irish connection specifically for the greeting
formula "how's yourself?".  this is plausible, but even the formula
could be a use of the reflexive for emphasis.  the other examples he
discusses, and the ones i mentioned in my earlier posting, seem to
involve emphasis, contrast, discourse perspective, and outright
logophoricity, and are of types that occur in language after
language, so there's no reason to appeal to irish here.

it's known that logophoric reflexives were more common in earlier
english than they are now and that there's considerable individual
variation in their use.  i don't know of any systematic studies of
variation tied to the usual large-scale factors (geography, age, sex,
class, race/ethnicity, etc.), though i'd bet there's something going
on there.

wilson's "me myself" pattern is a variant of somewhat more widespread
patterns for marking material as the speaker's opinion:
   Me, I love raw fish.            As for me, I love raw fish.
   Myself, I love raw fish.      As for myself, I love raw fish.
the pattern wilson reports on --
   Me myself, I love raw fish.
is a piling-on of the two other patterns, presumably for extra
emphasis.  i suspect it's not at all restricted to black speakers.
but thanks to a film entitled "Me Myself I" and a joan armatrading
album with this title, plus "me myself (and) I" as a formula in
itself, googling is really hard to do.

ah, but you hit paydirt on <"as for me myself, I">, with a
respectable number of hits, from all over the place.

arnold

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