Theirself or Themself?
cliffhays.weebly.com
cliffhays.weebly.com
The reason why 'their' can be used in the same position in the sentence is that it's used as a modifier to the object, i.e. the position in the sentence is the same but the syntax tree is different.
The submitted post is interesting because a lot of us prefer they/them for the gender-neutral 3rd person singular pronoun[0], and it raises an interesting corner case. I had to think about it for a bit, but I think "themself" sounds most natural to me.
[0] Why default to "he" when gender is unknown? Is correct number but incorrect gender better than "they", which is incorrect number but correct gender? "They" is natural to almost all native English speakers and has been used in that capacity in writing since at least Chaucer.
edit: Hm, now I wish I hadn't downvoted. Sorry about that. I suppose it's helpful for non-native HN speakers to know the "correct" word for academic writing, as much as it irritates me that that is what's considered correct.
The above notwithstanding, i certainly don't disagree that informal English has morphed towards usage of 'they' as the general gender neutral pronoun in all cases, as I myself just had to go back and correct "they don't" to "he doesn't" in the paragraph above when referring to the writer, even though his gender is clear from his name.
However I personally have no issue with 'himself' being the correct pronoun in the singular gender neutral reflexive for formal English.
Really the only way to decide what is "correct" where language usage is concerned is to see how people actually speak/write, AKA a descriptive approach. Do a corpus study and then you'll have some basis to make a claim about what is and isn't standard usage.
This is tangentially related: the English language is a bit unusual in how flexible it is to change along with common usage. Other languages can have their usage dictated by the government; Germany, France, and Japan have all had noted language reforms that in some cases radically changed the language. That is not to say, however, that all their citizens automatically start following these reforms perfectly because lifelong habits are hard to break.
I know about the French Academy, for example. I would have assumed their influence didn't extend much beyond orthographic/spelling conventions.
Thanks to feminist grammarians, "herself" is also correct. Or else you'll have to check your privilege, or some equally horrible fate. Though this suggests that the default gender for unknown animate third person pronouns should remain consistent throughout your entire written work. The writer should probably just pick his own gender unless there is a compelling reason to do otherwise.
One such reason could be the conditional probability for the subject being male or female, depending on what you already know about him. Engineer? Him. Elementary schoolteacher? Her. Someone got a mammogram? Her. Someone got a Darwin award? Him. If the conditional probability is 50% either way, you just pick your own gender, as above.
Today, it is technically incorrect, because society today acknowledges that women are full, living, breathing human beings and may in fact be referred to as such in polite conversation.
If a student has an inappropriate question, whatever you do, do not berate them.
corpus.byu.edu/coca/ returns 95,000 hits for "themselves" vs only 43 for "theirselves".
"If a student has an inappropriate question, whatever you do, do not berate him."
would be formally correct
edit: and your corpus search correctly shows that the plural 'themselves' is correct over 'theirselves' while having nothing to do with the discussion at hand about the singular
'them' is plural and flatly incorrect when used as a singular pronoun.
edit: Again, 'them' is formally incorrect but informally acceptable in the singular usage.
Why? How do you know this?
"Themselves" is correct, even if it's inconsistent, because it's what most people say and understand. That's the point of a natural language. Not to be neat and orderly, but to be understood.
I have never heard anyone say "themself" or "theirself" and both words sound incredibly awkward to me.
It's increasingly acceptable to use "them" to refer to a singular subject when the gender is unknown. All but the strictest prescriptivists would now accept that usage. But if a writer picks "them" over "him/her," he should use it with internal, self-referential consistency.
exactly why it is incorrect to use in the singular.
and this is the difference between formal and informal.
there are rules that are widely accepted (formal) and then there are actual usages that are widely accepted (informal)
That said, linguists in recent years have been working out formal methods of acceptance for "themselves" as a singular-referring pronoun when the gender of the subject is unknown. See my previous comments about "them" as a free variable; this is the formalist's argument for the acceptability of "them." It is an argument advanced by some of the more influential logicians of the mid to late 20th century, such as W.V.O. Quine. It's an argument based more in symbolic logic than in traditional linguistics, but it's gained a fair amount of currency in the high-nerddom of syntax. It's by no means an established or generally accepted stance, however. The general, traditionally formal rule is that "them" is always plural, and the construction "singular subject = them" is a bit like saying "1 = >1," i.e., illogical.
It's not correct because it's plural. It's correct because most people agree that it's correct. If every english speaker on earth simultaneously decided that "xivuewq" was the correct reflexive form, that's what we would use.
Now in my experience, even when people use the singular "they," most people use "themselves" as the reflexive in that context. A few might use "themself," but they are in the minority. Best to use the widely accepted "themselves" in formal writing, then.
While the use of 'them' and 'themselves' is increasingly acceptable informally, it still violates basic rules of plurality that most people agree upon, and is thus formally incorrect.
without the rules, the language has no meaning whatsoever.