New English reflexive pronouns?

[Catherine Rudin]

I use themself.  Always have, I think ...   Among other things, it's the only way to do the reflexive of the gender-neutral they, as in "any student who hurts themself should go to the nurse" or "if you don't shovel that sidewalk someone's going to fall and hurt themself".   

I don't use theirselves, but I certainly hear it, and again, I don't think it's new... on the other hand, I wouldn't have guessed that it could have a different meaning from themselves.  

Catherine

>>> "Rankin, Robert L"  02/13/11 4:22 PM >>>
I don't find either of the forms David cites strange.  Both could easily occur in my "Southern" dialect.  'Theirselves' is just the plural of the very common 'hisself', as in "He shot hisself in the foot."  Maybe it is a reanalysis of 'himself' with 'his' simply possessing the noun 'self'.  It can't be possessing 'foot' because plain "He hurt hisself." is just as good.  These 3rd person forms are only distinctive in the masculine, of course.  Moreover, 1st person forms like 'myself, ourself/ourselves' also show the possessive pronoun.  '*usself' is not possible, so maybe the possessives are the older forms here.

Note the mix of accusative and genitive pronominals though.  It looks as though sometimes the accusative pronoun won out and sometimes the genitive one did.

literary      less-literary
myself      me-self (common in Britain)
yourself    you-self (common in AVE)
herself      herself
himself     his-self
themself   theirself (selves)

I also wonder if 'themself' is really restricted to collective nouns.  It wouldn't bother me at all to say "Two kids out of 10 hurt themself."  It seems to me that 'kids' are being counted individually here.  But, again, that's "Southern."  I have to admit that I've heard "theyself/theyselves" from not-very-literate people, but I wonder if that isn't more underlyingly "theirself/ves" with syllable final R dropping plus a little analogy.  

There's a nice term paper topic for some enterprising student.  With the enormous text collections available on line, one could check all these forms in all kinds of literature going back to the Middle Ages probably.

Bob

________________________________________
> Both 'themself' and 'theirselves' have been around a while. I first
noticed 'themself' in the '80s and might even use it myself.
'Themself' presumably arose as a result of the use of 'they' as a
gender-neutral 3rd person singular pronoun. Also note that 'themself'
gets 1.7 million Google hits.

It's discussed some here: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004285.html

Dave Costa

>
> 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
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