Abstract
As Barlow (1996) notes, the verbs that occur most frequently with reflexive pronouns in English corpora are not simple transitive verbs, but what are called distancing or viewing verbs such as find, consider and see. This paper will discuss the uses and functions peculiar to this construction in the Bank of English. In particular, attention will be given to the construction of “find + reflexives” and its collocates in order to elucidate what syntactic and semantic patterns are available for the reflexive sentences in question. Most learners’ English dictionaries characterize “find + reflexives” as occurring “in a surprising or unexpected situation”. Using corpus-based research we will be able to empirically answer the question where this semantic characteristic comes from.
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