Missing reflexive when there's a preposition


English does distinguish between a regular pronoun and a self referential one in all persons. However, it seems like the reflexive form isn't always needed.



She told him good bye and shut the door behind her.



I (not a native speaker) feel like saying "behind herself" would actually sound odd here. Here are my questions:



  • Is the sentence correct without a reflexive marker?

  • Would it sound wrong to use one?


If yes:




  • What would happen if "she" shuts the door and there's another female in the room? How would we know who has left?




  • Is there a rule to tell when one is needed? (I feel like it would be needed here: "She put the book behind herself"... sorry if that isn't idiomatic)





Answer



There's an exception when the reference is to location/place.



But we use personal pronouns, not reflexives, after prepositions of place...



See ngram for (behind her),(behind herself),(behind him),(behind himself)


P.S. In response to the side-exchange with Araucaria. This is too long for a comment, so I'm appending it:


As I see it, when an idiom uses a "locative" preposition, yet the meaning of the idiom has gone very far afield from a literally locative meaning, the preposition does not cease to be locative. In the German er ist zur Zeit nicht ganz auf dem Posten (~ "He's feeling under the weather") auf dem Posten still seems to function as a locative, even though the meaning of the expression is that the person is feeling ill. Same thing with "under the weather". The spatial meaning of the prepositions in those idioms has become very attenuated, to be sure, but I would still say they were locative prepositions. When we say "Don't worry, put it behind you" we don't literally mean put it in back of you. We mean "forget about it, let it go". But on some linguistic level, the locative sense is present. It seems to be a matter of degree: how attenuated the spatial meaning has become.


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