Reflexive Verbs

A reflexive verb is one where the subject and the object are the same person or thing—the doer is also the receiver. English marks this with reflexive pronouns: myself, yourself, himself, herself, itself, ourselves, yourselves, and themselves. When you say I accidentally burned myself with the hairdryer, you are both the person doing the burning and the person getting burned. Without the reflexive pronoun, the sentence becomes a different statement entirely: I burned (intransitive, you are on fire) versus I burned myself (you caused a burn injury to your own body).

Some verbs in English are so commonly reflexive that speakers drop the pronoun altogether, trusting the listener to understand that the action points back to the subject. This happens most frequently with grooming and daily-routine verbs: My father is shaving implies himself; She dressed quickly implies herself. The meaning is clear without the pronoun, and including it can sound overly formal or emphatic. However, some verbs change meaning when the object is omitted. He behaved means he acted appropriately; He behaved himself emphasizes self-control. Knowing when you can drop the reflexive pronoun and when you must keep it comes with exposure and practice.

Related to this is the middle voice, where an intransitive verb describes an action that happens to the subject rather than one the subject actively performs. The car does not drive itself in the literal sense, but English allows The car doesn't drive smoothly to mean the car's driving quality is poor. Other examples: This book reads easily (the reading experience is easy), The door opened (it opened, perhaps by itself or through unstated force). The middle voice is not reflexive in form—there is no reflexive pronoun—but it is reflexive in meaning, because the subject receives its own action.

A handful of verbs shift meaning dramatically when they take a reflexive pronoun. Apply yourself means to work diligently and with focus—it has nothing to do with filling out forms. Find yourself means to perceive your own situation or identity, often unexpectedly: She found herself alone in a strange city. Help yourself is an idiomatic invitation to take what you want, especially with food: Please, help yourself to the food. These reflexive collocations are fixed expressions that learners should memorize as units rather than parse word by word.

Reflexive pronouns also serve a non-reflexive function as emphatic pronouns, where they reinforce the subject without serving as the object: I built this house myself. Here myself is not the object (the house is); it emphasises that I alone did the building. For a fuller treatment of the pronouns themselves, see Reflexive Pronouns.