3.27 PRODUCTIVE FEATURE

If an action usually involves two different people but you want to talk about a case where the same person is involved twice, you can use a reflexive pronoun as the object of a clause. For example, it is usual to blame someone else if something goes wrong, but you can say 'I blame myself for what happened' if you are the only person involved in the blaming.

Although a few verbs are typically used with reflexive pronouns, you can actually use a reflexive pronoun as the object of any transitive verb, when the meaning allows you to do so.

This is a productive feature of English. Productive features are explained in the Introduction.

Reflexive pronouns are explained in paragraphs 1.115 to 1.122.