http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2
Philip B. Corbett, "Me and Myself", NYT 12/22/2015:
Several readers have lamented a tendency, in The Times and elsewhere, for writers to misuse so-called reflexive pronouns — the ones that end in “-self” or “-selves.”
Mr. Corbett tells us what he thinks the rule is — more on this later — and then gives a list of five examples of (what he considers to be) mistakes from past NYT stories.
It’s a small point, but careful readers detect a lack of polish when we get this wrong. Here are a number of recent cases where reflexive pronouns were used incorrectly, all involving “like” phrases:
Ms. Syz says her clients, primarily in Europe and the United States, many of whom are art collectors like herself, find traditional jewelry too staid and appreciate her mix of haute and tongue-in-cheek style.
“Herself” is not referring to the subject of the clause (“many”); there’s no need for a reflexive pronoun here. Just say “many of whom are art collectors like her.”
Mr. Corbett's concern for "lack of polish" can be added to a list of complaints given in the entry for myself in Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, gleaned from a stack of self-appointed usage authorities "from as early as Ayres 1881 ":
… snobbish, unstylish, self-indulgent, self-conscious, old-fashioned, timorous, colloquial, informal, formal, nonstandard, incorrect, mistaken, literary, and unacceptable in formal written English.
MWDEU responds by quoting Goold Brown (from The Grammar of English Grammars): "Grammarians would perhaps differ less, if they read more."
MWDEU has this comment on the various sources that complain about alleged misuse of reflexives:
Two general statements can be made about the what these critics say concerning myself: first, they do not like it, and second, they do not know why.
In contrast, Mr. Corbett is quite precise about the reasons for his displeasure:
A reflexive pronoun is called for when the subject and object (direct or indirect) in a clause are the same person. For example, in the sentence “She chided herself for the error,” the same person is the subject of “chided” and the object. Using a regular personal pronoun — “She chided her for the error” — would indicate that the object “her” refers to someone else, not to the subject.
Reflexive pronouns can also be used for emphasis: “He will do it himself.”
But writers sometimes use a reflexive pronoun where an ordinary personal pronoun is called for — perhaps in the mistaken view that the reflexive is more formal or correct. This often occurs in prepositional phrases such as “like himself.”
But as MWDEU observes,
The handful of commentators who have done real research have found the usage surprisingly widespread in literary sources.
And dozens of examples follow. I'll give a few more examples of my own below, from thousands that could easily be found.
In the end, it's clear that Mr. Corbett's proposed rule — use a reflexive pronoun if and only if it is an object or indirect object that co-refers with the subject of the clause's main verb — is one of those plausible grammatical hypotheses that simply turns out to be a mistake. At least, for Corbett to be right, we would have to conclude that nearly all the greatest English-language writers over the past couple of hundred years have been wrong.
Indeed, the fact that allegedly wrong uses of reflexives are so common in the published stories in the NYT ought to be a clue.
This leaves open the question of what principles really do govern the use of reflexive pronouns. There's a linguistic literature on this topic, and I have my own ideas, but for now I'll leave the commenters to discuss among themselves.
Below are a few examples involving what Mr. Corbett feels to be incorrect uses of like herself. I've marked the clausal subjects in blue and the reflexives in red.
Jane Austen, Sanditon:
All that had the appearance of incongruity in the reports of the two, might very fairly be placed to the account of the vanity, the ignorance, or the blunders of the many engaged in the cause by the vigilance and caution of Miss Diana Parker. Her intimate friends must be officious like herself, and the subject had supplied letters and extracts and messages enough to make everything appear what it was not. Miss Diana probably felt a little awkward on being first obliged to admit her mistake.
Jane Austen, Emma:
They all walked about together, to see that every thing was as it should be; and within a few minutes were joined by the contents of another carriage, which Emma could not hear the sound of at first, without great surprise. "So unreasonably early!" she was going to exclaim; but she presently found that it was a family of old friends, who were coming, like herself, by particular desire, to help Mr. Weston's judgement; and they were so very closely followed by another carriage of cousins, who had been entreated to come early with the same distinguishing earnestness, on the same errand, that it seemed as if half the company might soon be collected together for the purpose of preparatory inspection.
Charlotte Brontë, The Duke of Zamorna:
Disquisitions succeeded on Mrs Young's beauty, on the splendour of the diamond ear-rings she had worn at the opera on the very night she ran away with Lord Caversham; then, lamentation about her children – her eldest daughter, who was said to be like herself, very beautiful but too frolicsome for any nurse or governess to manage; her only son, who was at school and whom his father would never allow to come home in the vacations.
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland:
Just then she heard something splashing about in the pool a little way off, and she swam nearer to make out what it was: at first she thought it must be a walrus or hippopotamus, but then she remembered how small she was now, and she soon made out that it was only a mouse that had slipped in like herself.
Henry James, Preface, The Tragic Muse:
If Nick Dormer attracts and all-indifferently holds her it is because, like herself and unlike Peter, he puts "art" first; but the most he thus does for her in the event is to let her see how she may enjoy, in intimacy, the rigour it has taught him and which he cultivates at her expense.
Henry James, The Wings of the Dove:
The handsome girl had, with herself, these felicities and crudities: it wasn't obscure to her that, without some very particular reason to help, it might have proved a test of one's philosophy not to be irritated by a mistress of millions, or whatever they were, who, as a girl, so easily might have been, like herself, only vague and cruelly female.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Kavanagh:
It was Lucy! Her bonnet and shawl were lying at her feet; and when they had passed, she waded far out into the shallow stream, laid herself gently down in its deeper waves, and floated slowly away into the moon-light, among the golden leaves that were faded and fallen like herself,—among the water-lilies, whose fragrant white blossoms had been broken off and polluted long ago. Without a struggle, without a sigh, without a sound, she floated downward, downward, and silently sank into the silent river.
Thomas Hardy, The Hand of Ethelberta:
She became teacher in a school, was praised by examiners, admired by gentlemen, not admired by gentlewomen, was touched up with accomplishments by masters who were coaxed into painstaking by her many graces rather than by her few coins, and, entering a mansion as governess to the daughter thereof, was stealthily married by the son. He, a minor like herself, died from a chill caught during the wedding tour, and a few weeks later was followed into the grave by Sir Ralph Petherwin, his unforgiving father, who had bequeathed his wealth to his wife absolutely.
George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life:
How dreary the moonlight is! robbed of all its tenderness and repose by the hard driving wind. The trees are harassed by that tossing motion, when they would like to be at rest; the shivering grass makes her quake with sympathetic cold; and the willows by the pool, bent low and white under that invisible harshness, seem agitated and helpless like herself. But she loves the scene the better for its sadness: there is some pity in it. It is not like that hard unfeeling happiness of lovers, flaunting in the eyes of misery.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter:
Such loss of faith is ever one of the saddest results of sin. Be it accepted as a proof that all was not corrupt in this poor victim of her own frailty, and man's hard law, that Hester Prynne yet struggled to believe that no fellow-mortal was guilty like herself.
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth:
The other-regarding sentiments had not been cultivated in Lily, and she was often bored by the relation of her friend's philanthropic efforts, but today her quick dramatizing fancy seized on the contrast between her own situation and that represented by some of Gerty's 'cases'. These were young girls, like herself: some perhaps pretty, some not without a trace of her finer sensibilities.
Bret Harte, Mliss: An Idyl of Red Mountain:
The idea of consulting a lawyer had seized firmly hold of the young girl's mind. There was no reason why she should select Mr. Shaw in preference to another, except she heard that he was an elderly gentleman, distinguished in his profession, who was above the meanness of stealing from a little girl like herself. The fact of his being an elderly man and the father of a family was much in his favor.
Mark Twain, The Guilded Age: A Tale of To-Day:
Did this seem like a damnable plot to Laura against the life, maybe, of a sister, a woman like herself? Probably not.
George Gordon, Lord Byron, "The Waltz: An Apostrophic Hymn":
Blest was the time Waltz chose for her début!
The Court, the Regent, like herself, were new;
Update — responding to a comment that these examples "sound a little dusty", here are some more modern quotations:
Muriel Spark, Curriculum Vitae:
The older ones were part of family groups. There were students or brides-to-be like myself. There were a few valets or lady’s maids (whose employers were up in first class).
Colin, like myself, was temporarily separated from his child by the war;
Margaret Atwood, Lady Oracle:
She had sufficient experience with the nobility to know how they looked upon women like herself, who through no fault of their own were forced to earn their own livings.
At such times, contempt for his readers and for himself hovered in the room like a cloud of smoke, and his temper after one of these sessions was foul but cold, like smog.
Ursula LeGuin, The Disposessed:
He found the workmates dull and loutish, and even those younger than himself treated him like a boy.
Masturbation was preferable, the suitable course for a man like himself.
Thomas Pynchon, V:
Subalterns, enlisted men and gangers like himself shared them out of a common pool, housed in a barbed-wire compound near the B.O.Q.
The New Yorker, "The Joy of Hating":
Mostly, people hate Duke because they win; they have more Final Four appearances than all but three other teams. “ ’Cause they jealous,” Charles Barkley, another notable heel, said last week, when I asked why fans hated players like himself and Laettner, and programs like Duke. “They don’t get mad about the worst player. They only get mad about the great player.”
The New Yorker, "Why Biden would be a serious contender":
He’s still full of energy, he’s served President Obama loyally, he loves the game, and he thinks—pundits and pollsters be damned—that this might be the moment for an old-school, shit-kicking, hand-grasping, mouth-running, stick-up-for-the-working-stiff pol like himself.
The Atlantic, "Ebola's Body Collectors":
“This was completely new for us,” writes Ballah, explaining that local Red Cross authorities like herself had to lean on their international counterparts for guidance.
The Atlantic, "Even Candy Land Isn't Safe from Sexy":
Using a different set of dolls for each question, the researchers then asked each girl to choose the doll that: looked like herself, looked how she wanted to look, was the popular girl in school, was the girl she wanted to play with
I'll also elevate from the comments one of my responses to TR, who is not convinced that the deprecated examples are "reflexive pronouns" at all:
There's a terminological question here — should all uses of PRO-self in English be called "reflexive pronouns"? The general answer seems to be "yes" — that's what CGEL does, for example.
And then there's a question of morphosyntactic analysis — how many (and which) types should we divide the uses of such pronouns into? CGEL (pp. 1483-1499) distinguishes "complement" vs. "emphatic" uses, and also "basic reflexives" vs. "overrides". "Basic" reflexives are then subdivided into those with a "single-head domain" vs. those with a "dual head domain", along with quite a bit of further taxonomizing.
A few of the examples under consideration here are "emphatic" uses in CGEL's terminology. A few more are "basic" reflexives, where the antecedent is (say) a preceding object rather than subject. But most are "override" reflexives, where "there is not the close structural relation between reflexive and antecedent that we find with basic reflexives".
The critical part of CGEL's analysis is this:
(1) "the constructions concerned admit a 1st or 2nd person reflexive with no antecedent at all";
(2) "Overrides with 3rd person reflexives characteristically occur in contexts where the antecedent refers to the person whose perspective is being taken in the discourse".
I'd add that there seem to be some cases where the antecedent is the theme of the discourse, even if that individual's perspective is not clearly being taken.
Update #2 — I'll also add a link "Clarity, choice, and evidence" (5/23/2008), which contains some discussion on "rules" as opposed to "house style", mentioned in a comment below by Roger Depledge.
