Question

Fill in the blanks with suitable reflexive or emphasizing pronouns:
I ______________ spoke to the Director General of Police. He assured me that he would _________ look into my case.
a)Myself, himself
b)Himself, ourselves
c)Himself, himself
d)Myself, over selves

Answer 1

Hint: The reflexive pronouns are - myself, yourself, himself, herself, itself, oneself, ourselves, yourselves, and themselves. Whereas emphasizing pronouns are used to emphasize the fact that who does the action in a particular sentence.

Complete step-by-step answer:

When the subject and the object of the verb is the same person or thing, we use a reflexive pronoun. When reflexive pronouns are used to put emphasis on a particular noun, they are called emphatic pronouns.
The emphasizing pronoun for singular first-person 'I' is 'myself'. This indicates that the first blank must be ‘myself’. Therefore, by itself, we can eliminate options ‘b’ and ‘c’ as incorrect.

Now, the reflexive pronoun for a singular third person is based on the gender of the noun like - ‘himself’, 'herself' or 'itself'.
For the given sentence the noun is a male. So, the reflexive pronoun that has to be used must be 'himself'.
Thus, this implies that the option – ‘option a’ is the correct answer. Since ourselves is the reflexive pronoun for the plural first person, option‘d’ is also incorrect.

 Note: To understand the two pronouns better let us look into an example - if we say “John did his homework himself”, it means that he did his homework and not someone else. Here we can see that the reflexive pronoun ‘himself’ is being emphasized.