Topic: Pronouns. Personal and possessive pronouns Plan

Pronouns versus Pro-forms

	Example	Pronoun	Pro-form
1	It is a good idea.	✓	✓
2	I know the people who work there.	✓	✓
3	Who works there?	✓
4	It is raining.	✓
5	I asked her to help, and she did so right away.		✓
6	JJ and Petra helped, but the others didn't.		✓

Examples [1 & 2] are pronouns and pro-forms. In , the pronoun it "stands in" for whatever was mentioned and is a good idea. In , the relative pronoun who stands in for "the people".

Examples [3 & 4] are pronouns but not pro-forms. In , the interrogative pronoun who doesn't stand in for anything. Similarly, in , it is a dummy pronoun, one that doesn't stand in for anything. No other word can function there with the same meaning; we don't say "the sky is raining" or "the weather is raining".

Finally, in [5 & 6], there are pro-forms that are not pronouns. In, did so is a verb phrase, but it stands in for "help". Similarly, in , others is a common noun, not a pronoun, but the others stands in for this list of names of the other people involved (e.g., Sho, Alana, and Ali).

Grammar

Pronouns (antōnymía) are listed as one of eight parts of speech in The Art of Grammar, a treatise on Greek grammar attributed to Dionysius Thrax and dating from the 2nd century BC. The pronoun is described there as "a part of speech substitutable for a noun and marked for a person." Pronouns continued to be regarded as a part of speech in Latin grammar (the Latin term being pronomen, from which the English name – through Middle French – ultimately derives), and thus in the European tradition generally.

In more modern approaches, pronouns are less likely to be considered to be a single word class, because of the many different syntactic roles that they play, as represented by the various different types of pronouns listed in the previous sections.^[6]

Linguistics[edit]

Examples of "our" as a determiner or a noun.

Linguists in particular have trouble classifying pronouns in a single category, and some do not agree that pronouns substitute nouns or noun categories.^[1] Certain types of pronouns are often identical or similar in form to determiners with related meaning; some English examples are given in the table.

	Pronoun	Determiner
Possessive	ours	our freedom
Demonstrative	this	this gentleman
Indefinite	some	some frogs
Negative	none	no information
Interrogative	which	which option

This observation has led some linguists, such as Paul Postal, to regard pronouns as determiners that have had their following noun or noun phrase deleted. (Such patterning can even be claimed for certain personal pronouns; for example, we and you might be analyzed as determiners in phrases like we Brits and you tennis players.) Other linguists have taken a similar view, uniting pronouns and determiners into a single class, sometimes called "determiner-pronoun", or regarding determiners as a subclass of pronouns or vice versa. The distinction may be considered to be one of subcategorization or valency, rather like the distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs – determiners take a noun phrase complement like transitive verbs do, while pronouns do not. This is consistent with the determiner phrase viewpoint, whereby a determiner, rather than the noun that follows it, is taken to be the head of the phrase. Cross-linguistically, it seems as though pronouns share 3 distinct categories: point of view, person, and number. The breadth of each subcategory however tends to differ among languages.