grammar - "greater than I am" versus "greater than myself"


If I look in the corpus of contemporary American English, I mostly find the ... greater than I am/he is/etc. ... version. But there are a couple of instances, even in academic texts, of the sort ... greater than myself/himself etc. ... sort.


As far as I understand the rule, comparative + than is followed by a clause - i.e., subject and verb. Where do the reflexive pronoun ...self instances come from?


Am I missing something, or are they just falling for the "looks like an object position, so let's use an object pronoun" trap?




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