Reflexive pronouns for politeness
We sometimes use reflexive pronouns instead of personal pronouns for politeness, but not as the subject of a clause: …

reflexive | American Dictionary

reflexive
adjective[ not gradable ]
us/rɪˈflek·sɪv/
grammar
showing that the action of the verb is directed back on the subject:
In the sentence "He hurt himself," "hurt" is a reflexive verb and "himself" is a reflexive pronoun.

Examples of reflexive

reflexive
Half the items used reflexives and half used personal pronouns.
The issue at hand is the acquisition of reflexives.
With these two constraints alone, reflexives are predicted to be correctly understood and produced, yet pronouns are only predicted to be correctly produced.
Pronouns and reflexives were interpreted equally well in this condition, at the high level at which reflexives are interpreted in other conditions.
Processing of reflexives, where the interpretation is obtained within the clause via syntactic mechanisms alone, is less costly than that of referentially ambiguous pronouns.
On average, the reflexives, himself and herself, were approximately three times as long as the pronouns, him and her (330 ms vs. 100 ms).
We make use of the binding theory for reflexives.
Then why do we need to distinguish between local coargument reflexives and m-reflexives if both of them are associated with syntactic binding ?
Subjects were asked to judge the grammaticality of sentences containing reflexives and embedded clauses with or without complementizers like "that" present.
More specifically, they focus on the processing of intrasentential anaphora, especially of intrasentential reflexives and pronouns during language comprehension.
In sum, we can say that children are equally good at producing and comprehending reflexives and pronouns if a coherent discourse is provided.
The basic intuition derived from the contrast in (1a) and (1b) is that reflexives and pronouns are in complementary distribution.
In their first three experiments, children's comprehension of object pronouns and reflexives was studied in sentences with referential subjects.
The fact that these noncoargument reflexives allow syntactic binding clearly indicates that syntactic binding is not restricted to reflexives in direct argument positions.
Sentence-internal features, like reflexives then, are among the few phenomena not treated in the book.
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