Pronouns Definitions

Disjunctive pronoun

A disjunctive pronoun is a stressed form of a personal pronoun reserved for use in isolation or in certain syntactic contexts.

Relative pronoun

A relative pronoun marks a relative clause; it has the same referent in the main clause of a sentence that the relative modifies. An example is the English word which in the sentence "This is the house which Jack built." Here the relative pronoun which marks the relative clause "which Jack built", which modifies the noun house in the main sentence. Which has an anaphoric relationship to its antecedent "house" in the main clause.

Generic you

In English grammar and in particular in casual English, generic you, impersonal you or indefinite you is the pronoun you in its use in referring to an unspecified person, as opposed to its use as the second person pronoun.

Personal pronoun

Personal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person - first person (as I), second person (as you), or third person (as he, she, it). Personal pronouns may also take different forms depending on number (usually singular or plural), grammatical or natural gender, case, and formality.

Reciprocal pronoun

Reciprocal pronouns are a type of pronoun which can be used to refer to a noun phrase mentioned earlier in a sentence. The reciprocal pronouns found in English are one another and each other, and they form the category of anaphors along with reflexive pronouns (myself, yourselves, etc.).

Strong and weak forms

Strong and weak forms of certain pronouns, found in some languages such as Polish.

Dummy pronoun

A dummy pronoun, also called an expletive pronoun or pleonastic pronoun, is a pronoun used for syntax without explicit meaning. Dummy pronouns are used in many Germanic languages such as English. Pronoun-dropping languages such as Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and Turkish do not require dummy pronouns. A dummy pronoun is used when a particular verb argument (or preposition) is nonexistent (it could also be unknown, irrelevant, already understood, or otherwise "not to be spoken of directly"), but when a reference to the argument (a pronoun) is nevertheless syntactically required. For instance, in the phrase, It is obvious that the violence will continue, it is a dummy pronoun, not referring to any agent. Unlike a regular pronoun of English, it cannot be replaced by any noun phrase (except for, rhetorically permitting, something like 'the state of affairs' or 'the fact of the matter'.) The term dummy pronoun refers to the function of a word in a particular sentence, not a property of individual words. For example, it in the example from the previous paragraph is a dummy pronoun, but it in the sentence I bought a sandwich and ate it is a referential pronoun (referring to the sandwich).

Gender-specific and gender-neutral pronouns

A gender-specific pronoun is a pronoun associated with a particular grammatical gender, such as masculine, feminine, or neuter, or with a biological gender , i.e. female or male. Examples are the English third-person personal pronouns he and she. A gender-neutral pronoun, by contrast, is a pronoun that is not associated with a particular grammatical or biological gender and that does not imply, for instance, male or female. Many English pronouns are gender-neutral, including they (which in certain contexts can also refer to a singular antecedent such as "everyone", "a person", or "the patient"). Many of the world's languages do not have gender-specific pronouns. Others, however - particularly those that have a system of grammatical gender (or have historically had such a system, as with English) - have gender specificity in certain of their pronouns, particularly third-person personal pronouns. Problems of usage arise in languages such as English, in contexts where a person of unspecified or unknown gender is being referred to but commonly available pronouns (he or she) are gender-specific. In such cases a gender-specific, usually masculine, pronoun is sometimes used with intended gender-neutral meaning; such use of "he" was also common in English until the latter half of the 20th century but is now controversial. Use of singular they is another common alternative, but is not accepted by everybody. Some attempts have been made, by proponents of gender-neutral language, to introduce invented gender-neutral pronouns.

Possessive pronoun

A possessive form is a word or grammatical construction used to indicate a relationship of possession in a broad sense. This can include strict ownership, or a number of other types of relation to a greater or lesser degree analogous to it. Most European languages feature possessive forms associated with personal pronouns, like the English my, mine, your, yours, his and so on.

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 object pronouns are used after verbs and prepositions (e.g. watch him, look at him). In some other languages, a special set of pronouns is required in prepositional contexts (although the individual pronouns in this set may also be found in other contexts).

Resumptive pronoun

A resumptive pronoun is a personal pronoun appearing in a relative clause, which restates the antecedent after a pause or interruption (such as an embedded clause, series of adjectives, or a wh-island). 1. This is the girli that whenever it rains shei cries. Resumptive pronouns have been described as "ways of salvaging a sentence that a speaker has started without realizing that it is impossible or at least difficult to finish it grammatically". An English speaker might use a resumptive pronoun in order to prevent violations of syntactic constraints. In many languages resumptive pronouns are necessary for a sentence to be grammatical and are required to help interpretation and performance in particular syntactic conditions.

Indefinite pronoun

An indefinite pronoun is a pronoun that refers to non-specific beings, objects, or places. Indefinite pronouns can represent either count nouns or noncount nouns and include a number of sub-categories: universal (such as everyone, everything), assertive existential (such as somebody, something), elective existential (such as anyone, anything), and negative (such as nobody, nothing).

Intensive pronoun

An intensive pronoun adds emphasis to a statement; for example, "I did it myself." While English intensive pronouns (e.g., myself, yourself, himself, itself, ourselves, yourselves, themselves) use the same form as reflexive pronouns, an intensive pronoun is different from a reflexive, because the pronoun can be removed without altering the meaning of the sentence. An intensive noun works with the antecedent, the word the pronoun replaces. For example, compare "I will do it myself," where "myself" is intensive and can be removed without changing the meaning, to "I sold myself," where "myself" fills the necessary role of direct object.

Interrogative pronouns

An interrogative word or question word is a function word used to ask a question, such as what, when, where, who, whom, why, and how. They are sometimes called wh-words, because in English most of them start with wh- (compare Five Ws). They may be used in both direct questions (Where is he going?) and in indirect questions (I wonder where he is going). In English and various other languages the same forms are also used as relative pronouns in certain relative clauses (The country where he was born) and certain adverb clauses (I go where he goes).

Demonstrative pronouns

Demonstratives are words like this and that, used to indicate which entities are being referred to and to distinguish those entities from others.

Antecedent (grammar)

In grammar, an antecedent is an expression (word, phrase, clause, etc.) that gives its meaning to a pro-form (pronoun, pro-verb, pro-adverb, etc.). A proform takes its meaning from its antecedent, e.g. Susan arrived late because traffic held her up. The noun her refers to and takes its meaning from Susan, so Susan is the antecedent of her.

Reflexive pronoun

In language, a reflexive pronoun, sometimes simply called a reflexive, is a pronoun that is preceded or followed by the noun, adjective, adverb or pronoun to which it refers (its antecedent) within the same clause. In the English language specifically, a reflexive pronoun will end in ‑self or ‑selves, and refer to a previously named noun or pronoun (myself, yourself, ourselves, etc.).

Subject pronoun

In linguistics, a subject pronoun is a personal pronoun that is used as the subject of a verb. Subject pronouns are usually in the nominative case for languages with a nominative-accusative alignment pattern. In English the subject pronouns are I, you, he, she, it, we, they, what, and who. With the exception of you, it, and what, and in informal speech who, the object pronouns are different: i.e. me, him, her, us, them and whom (see English personal pronouns). In some cases, the subject pronoun is not used for the logical subject. For example, Exceptional Case Marking (ECM) constructions involve the subject of a non-finite clause which appears in the object form (e.g., I want him to go.) In colloquial speech, a coordinated first person subject will often appear in the object form even in subject position (e.g., James and me went to the store.) This is corrected so often that it has led to cases of hypercorrection, where the subject pronoun is used even in object position under coordination (e.g., Marie gave Susana and I a piece of cake.)

Object pronoun

In linguistics, an object pronoun is a personal pronoun that is used typically as a grammatical object: the direct or indirect object of a verb, or the object of a preposition. Object pronouns contrast with subject pronouns. Object pronouns in English take the objective case, sometimes called the oblique case or object case. For example, the English object pronoun me is found in "They see me" (direct object), "He's giving me my book" (indirect object), and "Sit with me" (object of a preposition); this contrasts with the subject pronoun in "I see them," "I am getting my book," and "I am sitting here."

Anaphora (linguistics)

In linguistics, anaphora (/əˈnæfərə/) is the use of an expression whose interpretation depends upon another expression in context (its antecedent or postcedent). In a narrower sense, anaphora is the use of an expression that depends specifically upon an antecedent expression and thus is contrasted with cataphora, which is the use of an expression that depends upon a postcedent expression. The anaphoric (referring) term is called an anaphor. For example, in the sentence Sally arrived, but nobody saw her, the pronoun her is an anaphor, referring back to the antecedent Sally. In the sentence Before her arrival, nobody saw Sally, the pronoun her refers forward to the postcedent Sally, so her is now a cataphor (and an anaphor in the broader, but not the narrower, sense). Usually, an anaphoric expression is a proform or some other kind of deictic (contextually-dependent) expression. Both anaphora and cataphora are species of endophora, referring to something mentioned elsewhere in a dialog or text.

Clusivity

In linguistics, clusivity is a grammatical distinction between inclusive and exclusive first-person pronouns and verbal morphology, also called inclusive "we" and exclusive "we". Inclusive "we" specifically includes the addressee (that is, one of the words for "we" means "you and I"), while exclusive "we" specifically excludes the addressee (that is, another word for "we" means "he/she/they and I, but not you"), regardless of who else may be involved. While imagining that this sort of distinction could be made in other persons (particularly the second) is straightforward, in fact the existence of second-person clusivity (you vs. you and them) in natural languages is controversial and not well attested. The first published description of the inclusive-exclusive distinction by a European linguist was in a description of languages of Peru in 1560 by Domingo de Santo Tomás in his Grammatica o arte de la lengua general de los indios de los Reynos del Perú, published in Valladolid, Spain. First-person clusivity is a common feature among Dravidian, Kartvelian, Caucasic, Australian and Austronesian, and is also found in languages of eastern, southern, and southwestern Asia, Americas, and in some creole languages. Some African languages also make this distinction, such as the Fula language. No European language outside the Caucasus makes this distinction grammatically, but some constructions may be semantically inclusive or exclusive.

T-V distinction

In sociolinguistics, a T-V distinction (from the Latin pronouns tu and vos) is a contrast, within one language, between various forms of addressing one's conversation partner or partners that are specialized for varying levels of politeness, social distance, courtesy, familiarity, age or insult toward the addressee. Languages such as modern English that, outside of certain dialects, have no morphosyntactic T-V distinction may have semantic analogues to convey the mentioned attitudes towards the addressee, such as whether to address someone by given or surname, or whether to use "sir" or "ma'am". Under a broader classification, T and V forms are examples of honorifics.

pronoun

a pronoun is a word that substitutes for a noun or noun phrase.