Reflexive Pronouns - EnglishClass101

Lesson Transcript

Hi, everybody! My name is Alisha! In this lesson, I’m going to talk about reflexive pronouns.

Let’s get started!

Okay, first, let’s explain what is a reflexive pronoun? So, reflexive pronouns are pronouns used when the subject and the object of a verb are the same person or the same thing. So, you probably already know some reflexive pronouns.

Let’s take a look at these list of pronouns.

So first, we have our subject pronouns. These are the words that we use when this people or objects are the subject of our sentence.

So, we have: I, you, we, they, he, she, and it.

These subject words all have matching reflexive pronouns. So, we use this in a couple of different situations, but today, I want to focus on using these words as pairs when the verb in the sentence is being done by this person and affects this person. So, let’s take a look at the pairs and then we’ll look at some example sentences.

So first, when our subject is “I,” the reflexive pronoun is “myself.”

When the subject is “you,” we have two pronouns we can choose from, actually. When we have the singular “you” meaning you (just one person), we use “yourself.” If we’re talking about “you” (as more than one person), we use “yourselves” as the reflexive pronoun. We’ll see an example of this later.

Next, when our subject pronoun is “we,” the reflexive pronoun is “ourselves,” ourselves.

Next, we have “they,” and the reflexive pronoun is “themselves.”

Next, we have “he.” Our reflexive pronoun, “himself.”

“She” - “herself”

And “it” - “itself.”

So, all of these pronouns are maybe commonly used words and we use them in other situations too, but for today’s lesson, we’re going to practice using them together, around the same verb.

I wanna make one point very, very quickly before we move on to these example sentences though. That’s about this point in red. One very common use of reflexive pronouns that I’m not going talk about in depth today is this use. We can also use reflexive pronouns for emphasis reasons. So, in this situation, when we use these pronouns for emphasis purposes, we typically follow the original subject here, in this case “I” in the first example, directly with the relative pronoun.

So, these example sentences:

“I myself disagree with that opinion.”

So, this is an example of a sentence pattern that’s used to really emphasize that it’s just me. I am the only person who disagrees with that opinion. So this is used for emphasis.

Let’s look at one more example of this use and then we’ll move on the focus of today’s lesson.

“The manager herself will attend the meeting.”

So, in this sentence, you’ll notice I have “herself” here used here. This reflexive pronoun, yeah. But here, “I have the manager,” so I just said, okay, well, this is a pair, right? You might see situations where the gender of the person is not specified in the subject, so we don’t say “she” or “he.” But instead, we use a job title or a position. So in this case, the manager in the situation is a woman and we’re using it directly after the subject.

“The manager herself will attend the meeting.”

So, in this situation, we’re emphasizing the manager is going to attend. We want to kind of give some sort of special emphasis or show that this is a special situation. So you may see this pronouns used in this way, but this is not the focus for today’s lesson.

I want to focus now on using these as pairs around a verb.

So, let’s take a look at how we used these two words together.

The first example is one of my favorite examples to use, to practice this grammar point:

“I hit myself in the face.”

So, what does the sentence mean? This sentence uses the verb “hit,” to hit or to punch something, right? So, maybe, most of us have had the experience, unfortunately, of maybe trying to pull a blanket or do something and on accident, not on purpose, you hit yourself in the face. So, in this situation and we’ll see in all the other sentences, the person doing the action is me, so “I hit myself.” So, this shows us the person doing the action and the person receiving the action are the same person. This is what we use reflexive pronouns to do. So, in this situation, a funny one but relatable, I hit myself in the face.

Okay, let’s look at a different subject.

“You should pat yourself on the back!”

So, to pat yourself on the back means you should congratulate yourself. So this motion, to pat yourself on the back, this is a kind of expression that we use to say you should feel proud of yourself or you should feel good about yourself.

So, in this situation, we have this reflexive pronoun used. “You” is the subject (one person).

“You should pat yourself on the back.” So again, the subject and the person receiving the action are the same person. “You should pat yourself on the back,” so meaning you should feel proud of yourself. So, another very positive expression that you can use.

Okay, let’s look at “you,” again, but in this situation, we’re going to look at the plural “you.” So, I mentioned earlier that we can use “you” in two forms with reflexive pronouns. We can use “you - yourself” for one person and “you - yourselves” for more than one person. So, let’s take a look at this. Here.

“Wow! Did you design your home yourselves?”

So, “Wow! Did you design your home yourselves?”

This is formatted as a question. So, someone is maybe visiting your house and they want to ask you and the person you live with, “Wow! Did you…” meaning more than one person, “Did you design your home yourselves?” So, this person is asking, were you, the person who is also the subject of this question, and the person who did the action the same person? Did you design your home youselves? It looks great. So, we can use “you” with a plural reflexive pronoun. That’s the key point to keep in mind here. Singular is “yourself,” plural is “yourselves.”

Okay, let’s move along to the next example.

“We bought ourselves a TV.”

So in this sentence, we have our “we” (subject), our verb is “bought” and we have “ourselves” as the object. So think of this in like a gift-giving situation. When you buy something for someone else, this sentence takes on a different pattern, right? “I bought (something) for my friend,” right? Or “I bought my friend (something),” right? The person who receives the item comes after “bought,” but in this case, we want to say “We bought (something) for ourselves,” so we are the receiver and we are the person that bought, or we are the people that bought that thing.

So, we can use this to talk about purchases that we make for ourselves, if it’s “we,” more than one person, or if it’s just one person, you could say “I bought myself a new TV.” So this a very common use of this reflexive pronoun.

Okay, let’s look at our next one. The next one is kind of a sports style sentence.

“They positioned themselves on the football field.”

So, this sentence, “They positioned themselves…” means like the players in the game, so the football players. They are the subject, they are the people doing it, and they are also the people kind of receiving this action. So, the people are in charge of it and they are affected by this action. They positioned themselves on the football field.

Okay, the next example uses he, he.

So, “He’s teaching himself how to cook.”

“He’s teaching himself how to cook.”

This pattern is a very, very helpful one. The subject is teaching and [pronoun] how to (something). So you can use this to talk about things that you are teaching yourself to do as well. In this sentence, you’ll notice the grammar is a little bit different. Here, we’re using a progessive grammar form - “He is teaching himself how to cook.” This shows it’s an ongoing action. So in this case, he is the subject, he is the person, and he is, rather, he is the person that is the teacher and he is also the learner. That’s what this communicates. So, teacher are learner are the same person. We have this in this expression - “He’s teaching himself how to cook.”

If you want to use this to talk about something that you are teaching yourself to do, you can say “I’m teaching myself how to [whatever].” “I’m teaching myself how to speak English,” for example.

Okay, let’s take a look at the next example sentence.

“She locked herself out of her car!”

Another very common situation. So in this case, we have “she” as our subject and then locked. So in this case, we have “to lock a car” meaning to close the car with the keys, so we cannot go inside. And then herself, she locked herself out. So, this particular expression, “to lock out of (something)” means that we are unable to get into something and its our own fault. So, this expression means that she was the person who locked the car and she’s affected because she cannot get in the car as well. That’s what this means. She locked herself out of her car. We can also use this with houses, apartments, and so on. I’ve locked myself out of my apartment. He locked himself out of his house. So this is very common expression that we use to talk about this situation where it’s your fault, you are the person who locked the car or locked the home and you are the person affected by the situation.

Okay, let’s look at our last example. The last example uses an object.

So, “The lamp turned itself on when we got home.”

“The lamp turned itself on when we got home.”

So, maybe you remember at the beginning of this lesson, I mentioned we use “it” as a subject here. So, this “it” can take different forms. We can also replace it with a specific object here. So in this case the lamp is “it.” So, it’s not a he or a she, it’s an object, so we can replace it with an object in this case and still follow the “it - itself” reflexive pronoun rule. So, in this case, the lamp turned itself on when we got home. So again, in this situation, the lamp is the actor here and the lamp turned itself on.

So, this is something that we use. This kind of pattern is something we use for home electronics like the computer turned itself on or my phone turned itself on. This means I didn’t do anything, the machine acted alone. So, we can use this to talk about like actions that are kind of mysterious with machines and we can also use it, perhaps, in a case like this to talk about something that’s motion activated or maybe that has a timer set and so on.

So when you want to talk about machines or lighting in your house, these kind of things that can do things by themselves, like we don’t have to hit the switch or do any kind of settings, we can talk about those things with the object turned itself on. We can also do the opposite, “The object turned itself off.” But the key here is that we’re using “It turned itself.” So again, that reflexive pronoun is used to show that these two things, the subject and the object are affected by the same verb or they’re acting together with the verb.

Okay, so this is a quick introduction to reflexive pronouns and how we use them. These are actually very, very commonly used in everyday speech and they’re also very helpful, if we’re talking about these kinds of interesting experiences where the subject and the object of the verb are the same.

Thanks very much for watching this lesson and I will see you again soon. Bye!

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