Pronoun
Encyclopedia
In linguistics
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.
    • Distributive pronoun
      Distributive pronoun
      A distributive pronoun considers members of a group separately, rather than collectively.They include each, any, either, neither and others.* "to each his own" — Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary...

      s are used to refer to members of a group separately rather than collectively. English example: To each his own.
    • 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.

See also

Personal Pronouns
In English
  • English personal pronouns
    English personal pronouns
    The personal pronouns in the English language can have various forms according to gender, number, person, and case. Modern English is a language with very little noun or adjective inflection, to the point where some authors describe it as analytic, but the Modern English system of personal pronouns...

  • Old English pronouns


In other languages
  • Old Dutch pronouns
  • Bulgarian pronouns
    Bulgarian pronouns
    Bulgarian pronouns vary in gender, number, definiteness and case. They, more than any other part of speech, have preserved the proto-Slavic case system...

  • Cantonese pronouns
    Cantonese pronouns
    Pronouns in Cantonese are less numerous than their Indo-European languages counterparts.- Personal pronouns :There exist many more pronouns in Classical Chinese and in literary works, including or for "you", and for "I" and However, they are not encountered in colloquial speech.- The...

  • Chinese pronouns
    Chinese pronouns
    Chinese pronouns differ somewhat from their English counterparts. For instance, there is no differentiation between "he", "she" and "it", though a written difference was introduced after contact with the West, and with the exception of the reflexive self, pronouns remain the same whether they are...

  • Dutch grammar: Pronouns
  • Esperanto grammar: Pronouns
  • French pronouns
    French pronouns
    French pronouns are inflected to indicate their role in the sentence , as well as to reflect the person, gender, and number of their referents...

  • German pronouns
    German pronouns
    German pronouns describe a set of German words with specific functions, such as being the subject of a clause, or relating the main clause to a subordinate one.Germanic pronouns are divided in to six groups;...

  • Ido pronouns
  • Interlingua pronouns
  • Irish morphology: Pronouns
  • Italian grammar: Pronouns
  • Japanese pronouns
    Japanese pronouns
    Pronouns are used less frequently in the Japanese language than in many other languages, mainly because there is no grammatical requirement to include the subject in a sentence. So, pronouns can seldomly be translated from English to Japanese on a one-on-one basis.The common, English pronouns, such...

  • Korean pronouns
    Korean pronouns
    Korean pronouns pose some difficulty to speakers of English due to their complexity. The Korean language makes extensive use of speech levels and honorifics in its grammar, and Korean pronouns also change depending on the social distinction between the speaker and the person or persons spoken...

  • Macedonian pronouns
    Macedonian pronouns
    A pronoun is a substitute for a noun or a noun phrase, or things previously mentioned or understood from the context. These are words like јас 'I', мене 'me', себе 'himself, herself', ова 'this', кој 'who, which', некој 'somebody', никој 'nobody', сите 'all', секој 'everybody'.Macedonian pronouns...

  • Novial: Pronouns
  • Portuguese personal pronouns
  • Proto-Indo-European pronouns
  • Slovene pronouns
  • Spanish grammar: Pronouns
    Spanish pronouns
    The Spanish language has a range of pronouns that in some ways work quite differently from English ones. In particular, subject pronouns are often omitted, and object pronouns usually precede the verb.-Personal pronouns:...

  • Vietnamese pronouns
    Vietnamese pronouns
    Vietnamese pronouns can act as substitutions for noun phrase. While true pronouns exist in Vietnamese, most are rarely used in polite speech. In most cases, kinship terminology is used when referring to oneself, the audience, or a third party. These terms might differ slightly in different regions...



General
  • Anaphora (linguistics)
    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...

  • Cataphora
  • Clusivity
    Clusivity
    In linguistics, clusivity is a distinction between inclusive and exclusive first-person pronouns and verbal morphology, also called inclusive "we" and exclusive "we"...

  • Gender-specific pronoun
    Gender-specific pronoun
    A language has 'gender-specific pronouns' when personal pronouns have different forms according to the gender of their referents.The English language has three gender-specific pronouns in the 3rd. person singular, whose declined forms are also gender-specific: he , she , and it...

  • Gender-neutral pronoun
    Gender-neutral pronoun
    A gender-neutral pronoun is a pronoun that is not associated with any gender. It designates two distinct grammatical phenomena, the first being pronouns/periphrastics that have been assigned nontraditional meanings in modern times out of a concern for gender equity, and the second being genderless...

  • Generic antecedents
  • Deixis
    Deixis
    In linguistics, deixis refers to the phenomenon wherein understanding the meaning of certain words and phrases in an utterance requires contextual information. Words are deictic if their semantic meaning is fixed but their denotational meaning varies depending on time and/or place...

  • Inalienable possession
    Inalienable possession
    In linguistics, inalienable possession refers to the linguistic properties of certain nouns or nominal morphemes based on the fact that they are always possessed. The semantic underpinning is that entities like body parts and relatives do not exist apart from a possessor. For example, a hand...

  • Phi features
    Phi features
    Phi features is a linguistic term to describe the semantic features of person, number and gender, as encoded in words such as nouns and pronouns...

  • 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...

  • Pronoun game
    Pronoun game
    "Playing the pronoun game" is the act of concealing sexual orientation in conversation by not using a gender-specific pronoun for a partner or a lover, which would reveal the sexual orientation of the person speaking. Lesbian, gay, and bisexual people may employ the pronoun game when conversing...

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