12_Pronouns

12. The pronoun, classes of pronouns, their general characteristics.

Generally pronouns stand for or refer to a noun, an individual or thing (the pronoun's antecedent) whose identity is made clear earlier in the text. For instance, we are bewildered by writers who claim something like They say that eating beef is bad for you. ‘They’ is a pronoun referring to someone, but who are they? Cows? Whom do they represent?

Kinds of pronouns:

The personal Pronouns

Unlike English nouns, which usually do not change form, personal pronouns change form according to their various uses within a sentence. Personal pronouns can be characterized or distinguished by person and case.

The demonstrative Pronouns (this/that/these/those/such) can behave either as pronouns or as determiners.

As pronouns, they identify or point to nouns, e.g.: That is incredible! As determiners they modify a noun that follows, e.g. That book is trash.

The relative pronouns (who/whoever/which/that) relate groups of words to nouns or other pronouns, e.g.: The student who studies hardest usually does the best.

The indefinite pronouns (everybody/anybody/somebody/all/each/every/some/none/one) do not substitute for specific nouns but function themselves as nouns, .e.g.: Everyone is wondering if any is left.

The intensive pronouns (myself, yourself, herself, ourselves, themselves) consist of a personal pronoun plus self or selves and emphasize a noun, e.g.: I myself don't know the answer.

The reflexive pronouns (which have the same forms as the intensive pronouns) indicate that the sentence subject also receives the action of the verb, e.g.: Students who cheat on this quiz are only hurting themselves.

The interrogative pronouns (who/which/what) introduce questions, e.g.: What is that? Who will help me?

The reciprocal pronouns are each other and one another, e.g.: My mother and I give each other a hard time.

Pronouns are a heterogeneous part of speech.

Problems:

1. The linguistic status of pronouns: they are not united by any morphological or syntactic categories. Some scholars refer demonstrative and possessive pronouns to adjectives and to adverbs.

Jeffry Leech combines personal and reflexive pronouns and refers them to the same group.

Blokh doesn’t treat possessive pronouns as a separate group, but as a possessive form of personal pronouns.

2. The linguistic status of –self pronouns: emphatic, reflexive = one part of speech.

3. The linguistic status of ‘which’, ‘that’, ‘what’, ‘who’: whether one polysemantic word or whether they are grammatical homonyms, that are different parts of speech.

4. The problem of analytical forms: a personal pronoun + a finite verb (an auxiliary) = traditionally, a predicative phrase, a free word combination. But Ilyish claims it to be an analytical form.

5. The problem of the category of number of personal, demonstrative and indefinite pronouns (Ilyish).

6. The problem of the category of case: nominative or objective, e.g. I vs. me.