Job Discussion Forums

[Joe Gahona]

[Stephen Jones]

The agent of an imperative is the second person, so you can't say
*"use these to help himself get relief"

but you can say:
Use these to help him get relief.
Use these to help you get relief.
Use these to help yourself get relief.

[Joe Gahona]

So it's optional whether you want to use the reflexive -- i.e., "Use these to help you get relief" and "Use these to help yourself get relief" are both identical in meaning and grammatically correct...? I greatly appreciate the time people have given to me in this thread, but that's the only conclusion I'm able to draw!

[Henry_Cowell]

No, it is not optional. You must use yourself in that particular sentence. If the agent is the same person as the one being "help"-ed, then the reflexive is required.

I don't know the variety of English that Stephen speaks. But I would never say the following sentence:

*Use these to help you get relief.

[Joe Gahona]

Cool, thanks for the straight answer, Henry.

I've e-mailed a crapload of copy editors about this and the answers I'm getting are split almost 50-50 between you and yourself. Once I've had some black coffee I'll dig into my Huddleston book.

EDIT: Here's an interesting bit from Huddleston & Pullam's Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (all emph theirs):

Status of the reflexive: mandatory, optional, and inadmissible
With respect to the choice between reflexive and non-reflexive forms, we have the three possibilities illustrated in [4], where the labels give the status of the reflexive:

[4]
i. Ann blames herself/*her for the accident [mandatory]
ii. Ann tied a rope around herself/her [optional]
iii. Ann realises that they blame *herself/her for the accident. [inadmissible][/i]

A reflexive form is mandatory if it cannot normally be replaced by a non-reflexive form with the same antecedent. The reflexive herself in (i) is thus mandatory since, as we have observed, Ann blames her for the accident cannot be interpreted with Ann as antecedent for the pronoun. A reflexive is optional if it is replaceable by a non-reflexive form with the same antecedent, as in (ii). And a reflexive is inadmissible in contexts like (iii) where only the non-reflexive form is permitted.

[Henry_Cowell]

Ann tied a rope around her.

That statement means that Ann tied a rope around another female! If that is not its intended meaning, then you surely see the ambiguity.

Only Ann tied a rope around herself means that she tied it around her own body.