A few years ago, a university administrator made an offhand suggestion that “the faculty should self-manage themselves.” The usage, with its double self, stuck with me. The doubling seemed both redundant and yet somehow helpful, stressing that this was the faculty's purview to manage, not the administrator's. I've noticed more of these constructions since then, people self-promoting themselves, self-pitying themselves, self-controlling themselves, self-governing themselves, self-medicating themselves, and much more. I was curious whether this was a new grammatical pattern or something that has been around for a long time. It turns out to be both and to have some interesting semantic properties.The online Oxford English Dictionary (OED 2000–) contains over a hundred pdf pages under the entry self-, prefix (rev. Jan. 2018, last modified Dec. 2025), and the vast majority of the 322 forms listed are nouns or adjectives. The OED notes that the prefix has been in use since Old English and describes its function as showing an object or in some cases adverbial relationship between the verb stem and the prefix self. The noun self-control, for example, implies that someone controls themself, the adjective self-satisfied implies that someone is satisfied with themself, and the verb self-quarantine indicates that someone quarantines themself (its first attestation was, naturally enough, from 1918 during the influenza pandemic).The OED does not treat the self- verbs as widely productive. It lists just 49 verbs with self- prefixes, ranging from self-commune ‘contemplate’ to self-radicalize. The majority of the self- verbs (29 items) are categorized by the OED as intransitive only; 13 are designated as either transitive or intransitive. Just 7 are listed as transitive only: The earliest, self-apply, is from 1609, and the latest, self-certify, from 1951.Among the verbs that the OED lists as intransitive or “also transitive” are self-immolate, self-sacrifice, and the obsolete self-murder.1 In their transitive uses, only a reflexive object is possible: one cannot self-immolate, self-sacrifice, or self-murder another person. In this respect, these transitive self- verbs are like what Huddleston and Pullum (2002, 1487–88) call verbs with mandatory reflexives. Perjure is perhaps the quintessential mandatory reflexive verb in that it is impossible to perjure someone other than yourself.2In other instances, the OED illustrates transitive self- verbs only with nonreflexive objects. Self-diagnose, for example, is given the definition “to diagnose or identify (an illness or medical condition) in oneself without consulting a medical practitioner” (sense 1, first published Jan. 2018, last modified July 2023) and self-regulate is “to regulate (something) oneself without external intervention” (first published Jan. 2018, last modified July 2023). Self-select, self-publish, self-certify, self-fund, self-finance, and self-report are similarly treated. All, however, can easily be found with reflexive objects. Several other verbs that today allow reflexive objects are treated as intransitive only by the OED: self-isolate, self-medicate, self-deport, self-quarantine, self-destruct, self-identify, and self-radicalize.3 It seems clear that many self- verbs are shifting to allow reflexive objects.Further evidence comes from the Corpus of Contemporary English (COCA; Davies 2008–). COCA provides nearly 200 examples of self- verbs with reflexive objects in the period from about 1990 to 2019. In all, COCA documents 66 distinct self- verbs occurring with reflexive objects, the most common of which were forms of self-teach (8 instances), self-identify (8 instances), self-select (8 instances), self-appoint (6 instances), self-regulate (6 instances), self-censor (5 instances), self-diagnose (5 instances), self-deport (4 instances), self-medicate (5 instances), self-mutilate (4 instances), self-promote (4 instances), self-support (4 instances), self-categorize (3 instances), self-develop (3 instances), self-govern (3 instances), self-impose (3 instances), and self-respect (3 instances). The verbs self-harm, self-immolate, self-realize, self-refer, self-describe, self-discipline, self-exile, self-manipulate, self-monitor, self-proclaim, and self-sabotage occurred twice each with reflexive objects. These data suggest that redundant self- prefixing with a following reflexive is already a productive pattern in colloquial English, and we can expect to see the formation of additional self- verbs increasing as the pattern becomes even more widespread.4This expansion of the pattern is illustrated as well by Google N-grams such as those in figure 1 for self-select, self-identify, self-medicate, and self-control, which suggest an increase since the late twentieth century.Three questions arise in connection with this syntactic form: How do the self- verbs arise? Why do self- verbs occur with reflexive objects? And what, if anything, does the redundant self- add to the meaning?A likely origin of some self- verbs is by back-formation or functional shift from earlier self- nouns or adjectives. Thus, the noun self-government can yield the backform self-govern, the adjective self-published can yield the verb to self-publish, and so on.5 We would then expect to find attestations of the noun and adjective self- forms earlier than the self- verb forms. In fact, this seems to be the case for a number of contemporary self- verbs. The OED first cites the adjective self-governed from 1570 and the noun self-government from 1622, but it has no entry for the verb self-govern. The adjective self-published is first cited from 1838, while the earliest citation of the verb self-publish is from 1943. Table 1 gives the earliest citations for a number of self-verbs and their corresponding nouns.6 With the exception of self-determine, the nouns precede the verbs by decades or even centuries. In the last two cases, self-sacrifice and self-pity, the change is, of course, a functional shift rather than back-formation.Once such self- verbs are in use, reflexive objects are a natural consequence. As is the case with the mandatory reflexive verbs perjure and ingratiate, the potential for an object follows from the subcategorization properties of the verb stems. Subcategorization (or valency) refers to the conditions on what sort of arguments verbs require or allow. Eat, for example, takes an object or not: Jose ate or Jose ate a cookie. A verb like pity requires a direct object. We cannot just say *Jose pitied. When we create a new verb like self-pity, the obligatory transitivity of the verb pity is carried along to the new form and the derived verb now has a seemingly redundant himself, herself, or themselves as the object. Not all self- verbs will require a reflexive object of course: one can intransitively self-quarantine, self-identify (as), self-medicate, self-harm, self-deport, or self-immolate. In these cases, the transitivity of the root verb permits but does not require a reflexive.The third key question is whether the self- verb plus reflexive pattern is really a redundancy. Some self- verbs have to do with intentionally changing one's social, political, or intellectual status or with intentional actions that affect one's physical self. In some instances, the self- prefix appears to be transgressive, indicating that an individual is performing an action for which they would not ordinarily be authorized or expected to do, such as self-medicate, self-deport, self-diagnose, self-exile, self-roofie, self-proclaim, or self-censor. In other instances, it emphasizes the subject's autonomous agency, as with self-teach, self-respect, self-describe, self-immolate.7 Compare the variants in examples 1–7: the original sentence (a) is taken from COCA and then modified (b) by omitting the self- prefix:In these examples, the self-less verbs suggest a more professional or bureaucratic action than the prefixed verbs do (e.g., diagnose vs. self-diagnose, medicate vs. self-medicate, censor vs. self-censor). To diagnose something suggests a certain level of expertise; to self-diagnose suggests an internet search or some form of folk-medicine. To medicate something implies treating a condition with medicine and suggests medical expertise. To self-medicate shifts the meaning away from medicine and medical expertise. With injure verus self-injure and mutilate versus self-mutilate, there is a contrast in that the self-less forms need not refer to an intentional injury or mutilation, while the self- forms do: thus, imagine the speaker of example 5' mutilating herself accidentally while impaired, or the speaker of example 4' injuring himself in various accidents. Perhaps the self- forms have developed these nuances as a way of attenuating redundancy and differentiating from the self-less forms. Other verbs, however, seem to me to be identical with or without the self- prefixes when they have a reflexive object (e.g., exile vs. self-exile, promote vs. self-promote, sabotage vs. self-sabotage, motivate vs. self-motivate), though there may yet be further nuances to be mined.What seems to be the case is that the construction of a self- verb plus reflexive is increasingly used in English as a productive form with a semantic and syntactic rationale. Semantically, the reflexive object may be redundant, but it may also connote intentionality or autonomous choice, altering the meaning of the stem verb. Syntactically, the possibility of the reflexive is a consequence of the normal subcategorization conditions of the stem verb.Stylistically, the forms have still not made their way into widespread journalistic acceptance. The New York Times, for example, eschews such forms as self-immolate oneself, self-sacrifice oneself, self-quarantine oneself, and self-deport oneself. The single example of self-immolate himself that I found in the New York Times archive comes from a direct quote: “It enraged me that the change was brought about by an external suffering, a poor man had to self-immolate himself to bring out the people,” musician Rajeh Khazaal said. “The change wasn't from within and that affected me emotionally.” Vinita Bharadwaj, “Metal in the Middle East? A Music Scene Emerges,” New York Times, May 4, 2011And as Mackenzie (2018) observed, self- verbs have been considered somewhat marginal even when they do not have a reflexive object; he observes that 20 years ago The American Heritage Guide to Contemporary Usage and Style (2005, 418) reported that 71% of its Usage Panel found self-identify unacceptable.8 The American Heritage Guide suggests, “This resistance may stem from the fact that the prefix self- does not freely attach to verbs.”For linguists and lexicographers, there is much to investigate about self- forms. As they continue to proliferate, the set of mandatory reflexives verbs becomes larger. Huddleston and Pullum (2002, 1487–88), for example, give the following mandatory reflexives verbs: cry, acquit, pride, express, behave, ingratiate, busy, absent, comport, enjoy, apply (to), compose, excel, exert, demean, avail, and content.9Quirk et al. (1985, 357–58) offer a similar listing (which they simply call “reflexive verbs”). The analysis of reflexive verbs is by no means trivial, but Huddleston and Pullum and Quirk et al. treat them as a small set.10 Looking more closely, we find instead an expansive set of self- verbs with reflexive objects that suggests a wider phenomenon in English than has previously been noted.
Edwin Battistella (Sun,) studied this question.