Grammar Bites: Using Yourself and Myself

We have recently had some examples of 'yourself' come up in correspondence and a colleague asked me to explain where the usage was correct, and why. The examples she gave me were:

"I will endeavour to post to yourselves this week and look forward to receiving the commentary in the near future."

"Yes, there are places left on the course – is it for yourself?"

'Yourself' and 'myself' are 'reflexive pronouns'. We use 'reflexive pronouns' when the same person is both the subject and the object of the verb (for example, "I fell off my bike and hurt myself"). Other 'reflexive pronouns' include 'himself', 'herself', 'itself', 'ourselves', 'themselves', etc.

In the sentence "I made myself a nice cup of tea" the subject is 'I' and the (indirect) object is 'me', but we would almost always use the 'reflexive pronoun' ('myself') rather than 'me', especially in writing.

Going back to the examples at the start of the article:

"I will endeavour to post to yourselves this week and look forward to receiving the commentary in the near future."

In this sentence the person writing has missed out a direct object. The sentence should read: "I will endeavour to post [the thing] to you this week ..." There is no need to use 'yourself' here: 'you' is not both the subject and the object of the verb. If not absolutely wrong, 'yourself' is certainly unnecessary; it is an example of what linguists call the 'untriggered reflexive', where the reflexive is used even when it’s not required. Another example would be "Peter and myself have been talking about this project". The suspicion is that people use the 'untriggered reflexive' in instances such as this, because they’re not sure when to use 'I', 'he', 'she' or 'we' and when to use 'me', 'him', 'her' or 'us'. Either that, or they think that 'myself' sounds weightier and more formal than the more humble 'I'!

"Yes, there are places left on the course – is it for yourself?"

This is another example of the same problem, and a further use of the 'untriggered reflexive'. In this case the subject of the sentence is 'it' (the place on the course) and the object is 'yourself'. Again, the subject and object are not the same person, so the pronoun should not be reflexive. The sentence should read: "Yes, there are places left of the course – is it for you?" Incidentally, the sentence would read a lot better if it were worded: "Yes, there are places left on the course – is the booking for you?"

If the sentence was "Are you making the booking for yourself?" the 'reflexive pronoun' would be correct as the same person is now the subject and the object of the sentence.

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