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My aunt observed today that we don't use the reflexive when we say "Look behind you!" or "Walk straight ahead of you." One might indeed expect it; it seems to have the requisite conditions for the reflexive. And in fact some common collocations with prepositions do use it, e.g. "Look within yourself" or "to be beside oneself".

Has any reason been identified for this discrepancy?

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    I would challenge the premise that yourself is reflexive in those constructions; I’d say it’s emphatic rather than reflexive. The two can be difficult to separate in English, but the fact that we sometimes do also use the -self forms in the same constructions in more or less free variation with the plain forms (I would not blink at ‘he looked behind himself’) is a good indicator that it’s emphatic. Even so, there is clearly a construction-based difference: ‘Look ahead of you’ is fine, but †‘[don’t] get ahead of you’ is completely ungrammatical.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Aug 25 at 9:13
  • @JanusBahsJacquet Good point about the free variation.
    – Luke Sawczak
    Commented Aug 25 at 13:13
  • @JanusBahsJacquet Wouldn't you expect sentence-level stress if the forms were emphatic? Also, coreference with the subject seems required (*Look behind myself!).
    – TKR
    Commented Aug 25 at 15:25
  • @TKR Well, coreference with the subject is always required with -self forms, regardless of whether it’s reflexive or emphatic, so I don’t think that makes a difference here. I’d say there is sentence-level stress in cases like ‘he looked behind himself’ and ‘look within yourself’; the stress falls on the PP as a whole (and thus primarily on the preposition), but it is there. But then it’s also there in many reflexive uses (e.g., unstressed he 'gave it to him vs stressed he 'gave it to himˈself), so I’m not sure stress is a reliable litmus test.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Aug 25 at 15:50
  • 2
    It's an interesting question, in any case. I wonder if there's a kind of transitivity-hierarchy phenomenon where the non-reflexive form can be licensed for low-transitivity actions, in this case ones that don't affect the subject=object. So "Take care of yourself/*you" (affected) vs. "Look behind yourself/you" (unaffected). I don't know if this pans out. (Admittedly it would predict "I was beside myself/me" as both grammatical but arguably that's a set idiomatic expression rather than a productive use.)
    – TKR
    Commented Aug 25 at 19:14

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