Pronoun - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

and grammar

Grammar

In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics,...

, a pronoun (Lat

Latin

Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

: pronomen) is a pro-form

Pro-form

A pro-form is a type of function word or expression that stands in for another word, phrase, clause or sentence where the meaning is recoverable from the context...

that substitutes for a noun

Noun

In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition .Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of...

(or noun phrase

Noun phrase

In grammar, a noun phrase, nominal phrase, or nominal group is a phrase based on a noun, pronoun, or other noun-like word optionally accompanied by modifiers such as adjectives....

), such as, in English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

, the words it (substituting for the name of a certain object) and he (substituting for the name of a person). The replaced noun is called the antecedent
Antecedent (grammar)
In grammar, an antecedent is a noun, noun phrase, or clause to which an anaphor refers in a coreference. For example, in the passage "I did not see John because he wasn't there", "John" is the antecedent of the anaphor "he"; together "John" and "he" are called a coreference because they both refer...

of the pronoun.

For example, consider the sentence "Lisa gave the coat to Phil." All three nouns in the sentence can be replaced by pronouns: "She gave it to him." If the coat, Lisa, and Phil have been previously mentioned, the listener can deduce what the pronouns she, it and him refer to and therefore understand the meaning of the sentence; however, if the sentence "She gave it to him." is the first presentation of the idea, none of the pronouns have antecedents, and each pronoun is therefore ambiguous. Pronouns without antecedents are also called unprecursed pronouns. English grammar allows pronouns to potentially have multiple candidate antecedents. The process of determining which antecedent was intended is known as anaphore resolution

Anaphora (linguistics)

In linguistics, anaphora is an instance of an expression referring to another. Usually, an anaphoric expression is represented by a pro-form or some other kind of deictic--for instance, a pronoun referring to its antecedent...

Types of pronouns

Common types of pronouns found in the world's languages are as follows:

Personal pronoun
Personal pronoun
Personal pronouns are pronouns used as substitutes for proper or common nouns. All known languages contain personal pronouns.- English personal pronouns :English in common use today has seven personal pronouns:*first-person singular...

s stand in place of the names of people or things:
- Subjective pronouns are used when the person or thing is the subject
  Subject (grammar)
  The subject is one of the two main constituents of a clause, according to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle and that is associated with phrase structure grammars; the other constituent is the predicate. According to another tradition, i.e...
  
  of the sentence or clause. English example: I like to eat chips, but she does not.
  - Second person formal and informal pronouns
    T-V distinction
    In sociolinguistics, a T–V distinction is a contrast, within one language, between second-person pronouns that are specialized for varying levels of politeness, social distance, courtesy, familiarity, or insult toward the addressee....
    
    (T-V distinction). For example, vous and tu in French. There is no distinction in modern English though Elizabethan English marked the distinction with "thou" (singular informal) and "you" (plural or singular formal).
  - Inclusive and exclusive "we" pronouns indicate whether the audience is included. There is no distinction in English.
  - Intensive pronoun
    Intensive pronoun
    - In English :An intensive pronoun is a pronoun used to add emphasis to a statement; for example, "I did it myself." While English intensive pronouns use the same form as reflexive pronouns, an intensive pronoun is different from a reflexive, because the pronoun can be removed without altering the...
    
    s, also known as emphatic pronouns, re-emphasize a noun or pronoun that has already been mentioned. English uses the same forms as for the reflexive pronouns; for example: I did it myself (contrast reflexive use, I did it to myself).
- Objective pronouns are used when the person or thing is the object of the sentence or clause. English example: John likes me but not her.
  - Direct and indirect object pronouns
    Object (grammar)
    An object in grammar is part of a sentence, and often part of the predicate. It denotes somebody or something involved in the subject's "performance" of the verb. Basically, it is what or whom the verb is acting upon...
    
    . English uses the same forms for both; for example: Mary loves him (direct object); Mary sent him a letter (indirect object).
  - Reflexive pronoun
    Reflexive pronoun
    A reflexive pronoun is a pronoun that is preceded by the noun, adjective, adverb or pronoun to which it refers within the same clause. In generative grammar, a reflexive pronoun is an anaphor that must be bound by its antecedent...
    
    s are used when a person or thing acts on itself. English example: John cut himself.
  - Reciprocal pronoun
    Reciprocal pronoun
    The reciprocal pronouns in English are one another and each other. Together with the reflexive pronouns — myself, yourself, ourselves, yourselves, and others — they are classified as anaphors....
    
    s refer to a reciprocal relationship. English example: They do not like each other.
- Prepositional pronoun
  Prepositional pronoun
  A prepositional pronoun is a special form of a personal pronoun that is used as the object of a preposition.English does not have distinct prepositional forms of pronouns. The same set of objective pronouns are used after verbs and prepositions...
  
  s come after a preposition. No distinct forms exist in English; for example: Anna and Maria looked at him.
- Disjunctive pronouns are used in isolation or in certain other special grammatical contexts. No distinct forms exist in English; for example: Who does this belong to? Me.
- Dummy pronoun
  Dummy pronoun
  A dummy pronoun is a type of pronoun used in non-pro-drop languages, such as English....
  
  s are used when grammatical rules require a noun (or pronoun), but none is semantically required. English example: It is raining.
- Weak pronoun
  Weak pronoun
  A weak pronoun is a pronoun phonetically more independent than clitic pronouns but less independent than ordinary pronouns....
  
  s.
Possessive pronoun
Possessive pronoun
A possessive pronoun is a part of speech that substitutes for a noun phrase that begins with a possessive determiner . For example, in the sentence These glasses are mine, not yours, the words mine and yours are possessive pronouns and stand for my glasses and your glasses, respectively...

s are used to indicate possession
Possession (linguistics)
Possession, in the context of linguistics, is an asymmetric relationship between two constituents, the referent of one of which possesses the referent of the other ....

or ownership.
- In a strict sense, the possessive pronoun
  Possessive pronoun
  A possessive pronoun is a part of speech that substitutes for a noun phrase that begins with a possessive determiner . For example, in the sentence These glasses are mine, not yours, the words mine and yours are possessive pronouns and stand for my glasses and your glasses, respectively...
  
  s are only those that act syntactically as noun
  Noun
  In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition .Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of...
  
  s. English example: Those clothes are mine.
- Often, though, the term "possessive pronoun" is also applied to the so-called possessive adjective
  Possessive adjective
  Possessive adjectives, also known as possessive determiners, are a part of speech that modifies a noun by attributing possession to someone or something...
  
  s (or possessive determiners). For example, in English: I lost my wallet. They are not strictly speaking pronouns because they do not substitute for a noun or noun phrase, and as such, some grammarians classify these terms in a separate lexical category called determiner
  Determiner (class)
  A determiner is a noun-modifier that expresses the reference of a noun or noun-phrase in the context, rather than attributes expressed by adjectives...
  
  s (they have a syntactic role close to that of adjective
  Adjective
  In grammar, an adjective is a 'describing' word; the main syntactic role of which is to qualify a noun or noun phrase, giving more information about the object signified....
  
  s, always qualifying a noun).
Demonstrative pronoun
Demonstrative
In linguistics, demonstratives are deictic words that indicate which entities a speaker refers to and distinguishes those entities from others...

s distinguish the particular objects or people that are referred to from other possible candidates. English example: I'll take these.
Indefinite pronoun
Indefinite pronoun
An indefinite pronoun is a pronoun that refers to one or more unspecified beings, objects, or places.-List of English indefinite pronouns:Note that many of these words can function as other parts of speech too, depending on context...

s refer to general categories of people or things. English example: Anyone can do that.
- Negative pronouns indicate the non-existence of people or things. English example: Nobody thinks that.
Relative pronoun
Relative pronoun
A relative pronoun is a pronoun that marks a relative clause within a larger sentence. It is called a relative pronoun because it relates the relative clause to the noun that it modifies. In English, the relative pronouns are: who, whom, whose, whosever, whosesoever, which, and, in some...

s refer back to people or things previously mentioned. English example: People who smoke should quit now.
- Indefinite relative pronouns have some of the properties of both relative pronouns and indefinite pronouns. They have a sense of "referring back", but the person or thing to which they refer has not previously been explicitly named. English example: I know what I like.
Interrogative pronouns
Interrogative word
In linguistics, an interrogative word is a function word used for the item interrupted in an information statement. Interrogative words are sometimes called wh-words because most of English interrogative words start with wh-...

ask which person or thing is meant. English example: Who did that?
- In many languages (e.g., Czech
  Czech language
  Czech is a West Slavic language with about 12 million native speakers; it is the majority language in the Czech Republic and spoken by Czechs worldwide. The language was known as Bohemian in English until the late 19th century...
  
  , English
  English language
  English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
  
  , French
  French language
  French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
  
  , Interlingua
  Interlingua
  Interlingua is an international auxiliary language , developed between 1937 and 1951 by the International Auxiliary Language Association...
  
  , and Russian
  Russian language
  Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
  
  ), the sets of relative and interrogative pronouns are nearly identical. Compare English: Who is that? (interrogative) to I know who that is. (relative).

Pronouns and determiners

Pronouns and determiner

Determiner (class)

A determiner is a noun-modifier that expresses the reference of a noun or noun-phrase in the context, rather than attributes expressed by adjectives...

s are closely related, and some linguists think pronouns are actually determiners without a noun or a noun phrase. The following chart shows their relationships in English.

	Pronoun	Determiner
Personal (1st/2nd)	we	we Scotsmen
Possessive	ours	our freedom
Demonstrative	this	this gentleman
Indefinite	some	some frogs
Interrogative	who	which option

The views of different schools

Pronouns have been classified as one of the parts of speech since at least the 2nd century BC when they were included in the Greek treatise Art of Grammar

Art of Grammar

The Art of Grammar is a treatise on Greek grammar attributed to Dionysius Thrax, and written in the 2nd century BC. It is the first work of grammar in Greek, and it sought mainly to help speakers of Koine Greek to be able to understand the language of Homer and other great poets of the past.It...

. Objections to this approach have appeared among grammatical theories in the 20th century. Their grammatical heterogeneity, many-sided pronouns were underlined, which were classified as follows:

"indicative words" (Karl Brugmann
Karl Brugmann
Karl Brugmann was a German linguist. He is a towering figure in Indo-European linguistics.-Biography:He was educated at Halle and Leipzig. He was instructor in the gymnasium at Wiesbaden and at Leipzig, and in 1872-77 was assistant at the Russian Institute of Classical Philology at the latter place...

, Karl Bühler, Uriel Weinreich
Uriel Weinreich
Uriel Weinreich was a linguist at Columbia University. Born in Vilnius , he earned his Ph.D. from Columbia, and went on to teach there, specializing in Yiddish studies, sociolinguistics, and dialectology...

);
"indexes" or "indicators" (Charles Sanders Peirce, William Edward Collinson
William Edward Collinson
William Edward Collinson was an eminent British linguist and, from 1914 to 1954, Chair of German at the University of Liverpool. Like Edward Sapir and Otto Jespersen, he collaborated with Alice Vanderbilt Morris to develop the research program of the International Auxiliary Language Association ....

);
"words with changeable signification" (Adolf Noreen
Adolf Noreen
Adolf Gotthard Noreen was a Swedish linguist who served as a member of the Swedish Academy from 1919 until his death.-Biography:...

);
"moveable identifiers" (Otto Jespersen
Otto Jespersen
Jens Otto Harry Jespersen or Otto Jespersen was a Danish linguist who specialized in the grammar of the English language.He was born in Randers in northern Jutland and attended Copenhagen University, earning degrees in English, French, and Latin...

, Roman Jakobson
Roman Jakobson
Roman Osipovich Jakobson was a Russian linguist and literary theorist.As a pioneer of the structural analysis of language, which became the dominant trend of twentieth-century linguistics, Jakobson was among the most influential linguists of the century...

);
"updating" or "means of transferring from language to speech" (Charles Bally
Charles Bally
Charles Bally was a French linguist from the Geneva School. He lived from 1865 to 1947 and was, like Ferdinand de Saussure, from Switzerland. His parents were Jean Gabriel, a teacher, and Henriette, the owner of a cloth store...

, Émile Benveniste
Émile Benveniste
Émile Benveniste was a French Jewish structural linguist, semiotician, an apprentice of Antoine Meilletand his successor, who, in his later years, became enlightened by the structural view of language through the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, although he was unwilling to grasp it at first, being...

);
"words of subjective-objective lexical meaning" (Alexey Peshkovsky);
"word remnants" or "substitutes" (Lev Shcherba
Lev Shcherba
Lev Shcherba was a Russian linguist and lexicographer specializing in phonetics and phonology....

, Leonard Bloomfield
Leonard Bloomfield
Leonard Bloomfield was an American linguist who led the development of structural linguistics in the United States during the 1930s and the 1940s. His influential textbook Language, published in 1933, presented a comprehensive description of American structural linguistics...

, Zellig Harris
Zellig Harris
Zellig Sabbettai Harris was a renowned American linguist, mathematical syntactician, and methodologist of science. Originally a Semiticist, he is best known for his work in structural linguistics and discourse analysis and for the discovery of transformational structure in language...

);
"represents" (Ferdinand Brunot);
"survivals of special part of speech" (Viktor Vinogradov
Viktor Vinogradov
Viktor Vladimirovich Vinogradov was a Soviet linguist and philologist who presided over Soviet linguistics after World War II.Vinogradov's teachers at the Petrograd Institute of History and Philology included Lev Shcherba and Aleksey Shakhmatov, but it was Charles Bally's ideas that influenced him...

), etc.

The Azerbaijan Linguistic School denies independence of pronoun, it is not considered to be an independent part of speech, because relations between pronouns and other parts of speech are not equal and mutually exclusive, since the properties of pronouns overlap with other parts of speech as a subset of them. But this contradicts the second law of "logic division" (which reads: "Members of division should be mutually exclusive, i.e. should not overlap"). Dismemberment of all major parts of speech first to general and particular and then to abstract and concrete types shows that the place of abstract-and-general form of each part of speech is empty. The conclusion is that this is a pronoun which is traditionally (by historical inertia or under influence authority of ancient schools) separated from the other parts of speech, gathered in one class and called a pronoun. On the basis of this logic this school considers it appropriate to distribute pronouns among other parts of speech.

Types of pronouns

Pronouns and determiners

The views of different schools

See also