PRONOUN

PRONOUN

Definition:

A word (one of the traditional parts of speech) that takes the place of a noun, noun phrase, or noun clause. See "Observations," below. Adjective: pronominal.

A pronoun can function as a subject, object, or complement in a sentence.

Pronouns are a closed word class in English: new members rarely enter the language

DEMONSTRATIVE PRONOUN

Definition:

A determiner that points to a particular noun or to the noun it replaces. There are four demonstratives in English: the "near" demonstratives this and these, and the "far" demonstratives thatand those.

A demonstrative pronoun distinguishes its antecedent from similar things. When a demonstrative precedes a noun, it is sometimes called a demonstrative adjective.

Etymology:

From the Latin, "show, warn"

Examples and Observations:

·         "In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri."
(Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, 1979)

·         "Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand."
(Kurt Vonnegut)

·         "All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure."
(Mark Twain)

·         "Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest."
(Mark Twain)

·         "Those are my principles, and if you don't like them . . . well, I have others."
(Groucho Marx)

·         "Lord, what fools these mortals be!"
(William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, III.ii)

·         "Like other determiner classes, the demonstrative pronoun must replace or stand for a clearly stated antecedent. In the following example, that does not refer to 'solar energy'; it has no clear antecedent:

Our contractor is obviously skeptical about solar energy. That doesn't surprise me.

Such sentences are not uncommon in speech, nor are they ungrammatical. But when a thisor that has no specific antecedent, the writer can usually improve the sentence by providing a noun headword for the demonstrative pronoun--by turning the pronoun into a determiner:

Our contractor is obviously skeptical about solar energy. That attitude (or His attitude) doesn't surprise me.

A combination of the two sentences would also be an improvement over the vague use ofthat."

INDEFINITE PRONOUN

Definition:

A pronoun that refers to an unspecified person or thing.

Indefinite pronouns include quantifiers (some, any, enough, several, many, much); universals (all, both, every, each); and partitives(any, anyone, anybody, either, neither, no, nobody, some, someone). Many of the indefinite pronouns can function as determiners.

Examples and Observations:

·         "For many are called, but few are chosen."
(Bible, Matthew 22.14)

·         "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time."
(Abraham Lincoln)

·         "No one wants to hear about my sciatica."
(Bart Simpson, The Simpsons)

·         "I will not dance on anyone's grave."
(Bart Simpson, The Simpsons)

·         "It's clear that one is singular and takes a singular verb. One is, never one are. However, there's a small group of indefinite pronouns that have one in them, or imply the word one, that give us all verb trouble.

either, either one
each, each one
any, anyone, anybody
everyone, everybody
none, no one, nobody
neither, neither one

In speaking, most of us always correctly use the singular verb with anyone and anybody:

Anyone around my base is it.
If anybody wants this, he can have it.

But with the rest of the list, we often shift to the plural if there's an intervening modifying phrase:

Everyone is late for breakfast today.
Everyone of us are late for breakfast today.
Neither horse has been shod yet.
Neither of the horses have been shod yet.

We suggest that you say whatever you like, whatever sounds most comfortable. When it comes to writing, if you think somebody's going to be evaluating your grammar, stick to the singular verb after each of these words."
(Judi Kesselman-Turkel and Franklynn Peterson, The Grammar Crammer, Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2003)

·         "Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination."
(Oscar Wilde)

·         "A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them."

INTERROGATIVE PRONOUN

Definition:

A term in traditional grammar for a pronoun that introduces a question.

The five interrogative pronouns in English are who, whom, whose, which, and what.

Examples and Observations:

·         Who are you?

·         "Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whomare you going to speak it to?"
(Clarence Darrow)

·         "When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: 'Whose?'"
(Don Marquis)

·         Which color do you prefer?

·         "I got a belt on that's holding up my pants, and the pants have belt loops that hold up the belt. What is going on here? Who is the real hero?"
(Mitch Hedberg)

·         "Notice that an interrogative pronoun will never have an antecedent. Since it asks a question, there is no way to know which noun an interrogative pronoun refers to. The antecedent remains a mystery until the question is answered."
(M. Strumpf and A. Douglas, The Grammar Bible. Owl Books, 2004)

·         What versus Which
What is used when specific information is requested from a general or open-ended possible range. Which is used when specific information is requested from a restricted range of possibilities:

A. I've got your address. What's your phone number?
B. Oh it's 267358.
(an open-ended range of possible information)
[looking at a pile of coats]
A. Which is your coat?
B. That black one.

However, where the number of options is shared knowledge among speakers and listeners, what + noun is often used in informal contexts. Here, what is an interrogative pronoun used as a determiner:

[talking about a shop]
What side of the street is it on, left or right?
(or: Which side of the street is it on?)

A: Did you see that documentary about the SARS virus last night?
B; No, what channel was it on?
(or: Which channel was it on?)

INTENSIVE PRONOUN

Definition:

A pronoun ending in -self or -selves that serves to emphasize itsantecedent.

Intensive pronouns often appear as appositives after nouns or other pronouns.

Intensive pronouns have the same forms as reflexive pronouns. Unlike reflexive pronouns, intensive pronouns are not essential to the basic meaning of a sentence.

Examples and Observations:

·         "He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a lunatic."
(George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1948)

·         "But it is only through constant, faithful endeavor by the girl herself that the goal eventually is reached."
(Florenz Ziegfeld)

·         "Parents wonder why the streams are bitter, when they themselves have poisoned the fountain."
(John Locke)

·         "We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop."
(Mother Teresa)

·         "It seems to me, that if you tried hard, you would in time find it possible to become what you yourself would approve."
(Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, 1847)

·         The Difference Between Intensive and Reflexive Pronouns
"The contrast between reflexive and intensive pronouns is well illustrated with sit down, anintransitive verb that can also be used causatively, e.g. She sat the child down. It can be seen that John sat himself down is a reflexivised causative, whereas John himself sat downand John sat down himself are intransitive, with an intensive pronoun that relates to thesubject NP.

"Intensive pronouns are generally not placed in structural positions that could be filled by a reflexive pronoun. Watch is a transitive verb which can omit its subject--John watched Mary, John watched himself (on the video), John watched. In this case an intensive pronoun from the subject NP (John himself watched) would not be likely to be moved to a position after the verb, since it could then be mistaken for a reflexive substitute for the object NP. However, an intensive pronoun could be moved after an explicit object NP (especially if there was a gender difference), e.g. John watched Mary himself. ”

PERSONAL PRONOUN

Definition:

A pronoun that refers to a particular person, group, or thing. These are the personal pronouns in English:

·         I, me, my, mine

·         we, us, our, ours

·         you, your, yours

·         he, she, it, him, her, his, hers, its

·         they, them, their, theirs

Examples and Observations:

·         "Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much."
(Oscar Wilde)

·         "From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it."
(Groucho Marx)

·         "I stopped believing in Santa Claus when my mother took me to see him in a department store, and he asked for my autograph."
(Shirley Temple)

·         "I got kicked out of ballet class because I pulled a groin muscle. It wasn't mine."
(Rita Rudner)

·         They told me you had been to her,
And mentioned me to him:
She gave me a good character,
But said I could not swim.

He sent them word I had not gone
(We know it to be true):
If she should push the matter on,
What would become of you?
(from a letter read by the White Rabbit in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, 1865)

·         "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. . . . He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it."
(Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder, 1950)

·         "[M]ake the board of directors of British Telecom go out and personally track down every last red phone box that they sold off to be used as shower stalls and garden sheds in far-flung corners of the globe, make them put them all back, and then sack them--no, kill them. Then truly will London be glorious again."
(Bill Bryson, Notes From a Small Island. Doubleday, 1995)

·         "Personal pronouns are most typically used for backward (anaphoric) reference:

The manager phoned me back. He was extremely apologetic.

Occasionally a personal pronoun may be used to refer forward (cataphorically). Such uses are common in openings to written stories:

She was walking along a tree-lined suburban road, unaware of what was about to befall her. Gillian Dawson had never been very aware of the people around her."

(Ronald Carter and Michael McCarthy, Cambridge Grammar of English. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006)

·         "All of the personal pronouns except you have distinct forms signaling number, either singular or plural. Only the third-person singular pronouns have distinct forms signalinggender: masculine (he, him), feminine (she, her), and neuter (it). . . .

"Pronouns inflect for case to show whether they are functioning as subjects of sentences or as objects of verbs or prepositions."

POSSESSIVE PRONOUN

Definition:

A pronoun that can take the place of a noun phrase to show ownership (as in "This phone is mine").

The weak possessives (also called possessive determiners) function as adjectives in front of nouns. The weak possessives are my, your, his, her, its, our, and their.

In contrast, the strong (or absolute) possessive pronouns stand on their own: mine, yours, his, hers, its, ours, and theirs.

A possessive pronoun never takes an apostrophe.

Examples and Observations:

·         "Go on, get inside the TARDIS. Oh, never given you a key? Keep that. Go on, that’s yours. Quite a big moment really!"
(The Doctor to Donna in "The Poison Sky." Doctor Who, 2005)

·         "She underlines passages in my Bible because she can't find hers."
(Ned in "The War of the Simpsons." The Simpsons, 1991)

·         "Woman must have the fundamental freedom of choosing whether or not she will be a mother and how many children she will have. Regardless of what man's attitude may be, that problem is hers--and before it can be his, it is hers alone."
(Margaret Sanger)

·         "Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained."
(William Blake)

·         "The possessive pronouns (mine, yours, his, etc.) are like possessive determiners, except that they constitute a whole noun phrase.

1.      The house will be hers you see when they are properly divorced.

2.      Writers have produced extraordinary work in conditions more oppressive than mine.

Possessive pronouns are typically used when the head noun can be found in the preceding context; thus in 1, hers means 'her house,' and in 2, mine means ' my conditions.' Here the possessive pronoun is parallel to the elliptic use of the genitive."
(D. Biber, S. Conrad, and G. Leech, Longman Student Grammar of Student and Written English. Pearson, 2002)

·         "[The] construction with the possessive pronoun [e.g. a friend of mine] differs from the alternative of possessive determiner + noun (e.g. my friend) mainly in that it is more indefinite. The sentences in (30) below illustrates this point.

(30) a. You know John? A friend of his told me that the food served at that restaurant is awful.

(30) b. You know John? His friend told me that the food served at that restaurant is awful.

The construction with the possessive pronoun, in (30a), can be used if the speaker hasn't specified and doesn't need to specify the identity of the friend. In contrast, the construction with the possessive determiner, in (30b), implies that the speaker and listener both know what friend is intended."

RECIPROCAL PRONOUN

Definition:

A pronoun that expresses mutual action or relationship. In English the reciprocal pronouns are each other and one another.

Examples and Observations:

·         "Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other."
(John F. Kennedy)

·         "The capacity of human beings to bore one anotherseems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal."
(H. L. Mencken)

·         "There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die."
(W.H. Auden, "September 1, 1939")

·         "Each other and one another are known as the reciprocal pronouns. They serve either asdeterminers (in the possessive case) or as objects, referring to previously named nouns:Each other generally refers to two nouns; one another to three or more."
(Martha Kolln and Robert Funk, Understanding English Grammar. Allyn and Bacon, 1998)

·         "In modern English, most people normally use each other and one another in the same way. Perhaps one another is preferred (like one) when we are making very general statements, and not talking about particular people."
(Michael Swan, Practical English Usage. Oxford Univ. Press, 1995)

·         A Practical Grammar: In Which Words, Phrases, and Sentences Are Classified According to Their Offices, and Their Relation to Each Other
(title of a textbook by Stephen W. Clark, published by A. S. Barnes, 1853)

·         "Prescriptive style commentators have tried to insist that each other should be used between two people only, and one another when more than two were concerned. Yet Fowler (1926) spoke firmly against this distinction, arguing it had 'neither present utility nor a basis in historical usage.' His judgment is confirmed in citations recorded in the Oxford Dictionary (1989) and Webster's English Usage (1989).

REFLEXIVE PRONOUN

Definition:

A pronoun ending in -self or -selves that is used as an object to refer to a previously named noun or pronoun in a sentence.

Reflexive pronouns usually follow verbs or prepositions.

Reflexive pronouns have the same forms as intensive pronouns. Unlike intensive pronouns, reflexive pronouns are essential to the meaning of a sentence.

Examples and Observations:

·         "Good breeding consists of concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person."
(Mark Twain)

·         "Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self."
(Cyril Connolly)

·         "Take everything you like seriously, except yourselves."
(Rudyard Kipling)

·         "Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeatmyself."
(Mark Twain)

·         "A kleptomaniac is a person who helps himself because he can't help himself."
(Henry Morgan)

·         Hypercorrectness and Reflexive Pronouns
"The tendency toward hypercorrectness occurs with the reflexives as well as with thepersonal pronouns. It's quite common to hear the reflexive where the standard rule calls for me, the straight objective case:

1.      * Tony cooked dinner for Carmen and myself.

2.      * The boss promised Pam and myself a year-end bonus.

Note that the antecedent of myself does not appear in either sentence. Another fairly common nonstandard usage occurs when speakers use myself in place of I as part of a compound subject:

* Ted and myself decided to go out and celebrate.

These nonstandard ways of using the reflexive are probably related to emphasis as well as to hypercorrection. Somehow the two-syllable myself sounds more emphatic than either meor I."

RELATIVE PRONOUN

Definition:

A pronoun that introduces an adjective clause.

The relative pronouns in English are which, that, who, whom, andwhose. Who and whom refer only to people. Which refers to things, qualities, and ideas--never to people. That and whose refer to people, things, qualities, and ideas.

Examples and Observations:

·         "How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?"
(Charles De Gaulle)

·         "On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done just as easily lying down."
(Woody Allen)

·         "An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support."
(John Buchan)

·         "He was a Frenchman, a melancholy-looking man. He had the appearance of one who has searched for the leak in life's gas-pipe with a lighted candle; of one whom the clenched fist of Fate has smitten beneath the temperamental third waistcoat-button."
(P. G. Wodehouse, "The Man Who Disliked Cats")

·         "The people who had it hardest during the first few months were young couples, many of whom had married just before the evacuation began, in order not to be separated and sent to different camps. . . . All they had to use for room dividers were those army blankets, two ofwhich were barely enough to keep one person warm. They argued over whose blanket should be sacrificed and later argued about noise at night."
(Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston, Farewell to Manzanar, 1973)

·         "Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to speak it to?"
(Clarence Darrow)

·         "Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own."
(Nelson Algren)

·         "Franz Ferdinand would have gone from Sarajevo untouched had it not been for the actions of his staff, who by blunder after blunder contrived that his car should be slowed down and that he should be presented as a stationary target in front of Princip, the one conspirator of real and mature deliberation, who had finished his cup of coffee and was walking back through the streets, aghast at the failure of himself and his friends, whichwould expose the country to terrible punishment without having inflicted any loss on authority."
(Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia. Viking, 1941)

·         Who, Which, That, and the Zero Relativizer
"Three relative pronouns stand out as being particularly common in English: who, which, and that. The zero relativizer [or dropped relative pronoun] is also relatively common. However, . . . the relative pronouns are used in very different ways across registers. For example:

·         That and zero are the preferred choices in conversation, although relative clauses are generally rare in that register.

·         Fiction is similar to conversation in its preference for that.

·         In contrast, news shows a much stronger preference for which and who, and academic prose strongly prefers which.

In general, the relative pronouns that begin with the letters wh- are considered to be more literate. In contrast the pronoun that and the zero relativizer have a more colloquial flavor and are preferred in conversation.