Question

What is a reflexive pronoun?

Answer 1

Hint: Pronouns are words that can be used as substitutes for nouns. They're mostly utilized to take the place of nouns, so that we do not repeat the nouns over and over again. For the various ways we use pronouns, they have different forms. One such type of pronouns is the reflexive pronouns.

Complete answer:
We know that a pronoun is used as a replacement of a noun so that we do not use the noun repeatedly within the same sentence. In a sentence, if the verb's action is done to the subject (person or thing) itself, we make use of a pronoun and such a pronoun is called a reflexive pronoun. Reflexive pronouns are normally a verb's objects.

In other words, in case the subject and object (that perform the action verb and are affected by the verb) are the same, we use a reflexive pronoun for the direct object part. Also, where the subject and the object refer to the same entity, the object is denoted by a reflexive pronoun.

Let us consider a sentence: Marcel drove Marcel to the supermarket.
In the sentence above, clearly the subject and object are the same, and we normally do not give a sentence this way, so we need a replacement for the second ‘Marcel’, for this we make use of reflexive pronouns. To do this let us see how to form reflexive pronouns.

Formation of a reflexive pronoun is as follows;
(i) We have simple pronouns which look like this: my, her, your, it, him, our, them.
(ii) Find out the pronoun that would be used for the subject in a given sentence.
(iii) Then to the simple pronouns, if we add the suffix self (singular) or selves (plural) we can form the reflexive pronouns.
(Note that there can only be nine such reflexive pronouns.)

Now let us form the reflexive pronoun of the sentence we considered above;
Marcel drove Marcel to the supermarket.
- In that sentence, the subject is ‘Marcel’. We know that ‘Marcel’ is in the third person singular. Let us assume that the gender of ‘Marcel’ is male. Then the pronoun used for ‘male third person singular’ is ‘him’.
- Adding –self to the pronoun, since the subject was of the singular form.
- So the reflexive pronoun formed will be: himself.
- Replacing the second ‘Marcel’ with the reflexive pronoun ‘himself’.
- The final sentence will be: Marcel drove himself to the supermarket.

Similar way we can form reflexive pronouns for any subject.
More examples:
- I wrote myself a poem.
- You can carry it yourself.

Note: A reflexive pronoun is a commonly used type of pronoun. A reflexive pronoun cannot be omitted from a sentence. If the reflexive pronoun is removed, the sentence will not usually make much sense. If we wish to emphasize a specific noun with the help of a reflexive pronoun, they are said to be emphatic pronouns.