This work investigates the syntactic and semantic distribution of reflexive
forms themself vs. themselves. We focus on whether the use of -self vs
-selves is affected by specificity of the antecedent, distinguishing seven
levels for a singular antecedent: quantified indefinites (some/any),
quantified universals (each/every/no), generic kind definites, specific
indefinites, specific definites, unknown specific person, named person. We
administered an online acceptability judgment survey to 1,127 participants,
recruited on Twitter and Prolific, who rated sentences on a 5-point Likert
scale from “very natural” to “very unnatural,” in a randomized order, and
then completed a short demographic survey. We find that antecedent type,
-self/-selves form of the anaphor, and social variables including age,
gender, and endorsement of prescriptive language ideology all affected how
participants rated the sentences; themself was generally rated higher than
themselves for most antecedents, contra previous findings. Our results seem
to indicate that themself is preferred by many English speakers for
singular antecedents, and also that the singular use of themself/themselves
is a sociosyntactically active and salient variable across those speakers.