Personal pronoun

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For the Wikipedia style guideline about personal pronouns, please see Wikipedia:Pronoun
Examples
 He shook her* hand.
 Why do you always rely
on me to do your*
homework for you?
 They tried to run away
from the hunter, but he
set his* dogs after them.

*"Possessive adjectives" like

her and his are often seen as
pronouns as well, at least
informally.

Personal pronouns are pronouns used as substitutes for proper or common nouns. All known
languages contain personal pronouns.

Contents
[hide]

 1 English personal pronouns

 2 Usage
 3 Other types of personal pronouns
 4 Null-subject and pro-drop languages
 5 See also
 6 References

[edit] English personal pronouns

Main article: English personal pronouns

English in common use today has seven personal pronouns:

 first-person singular (I)

 first-person plural (we)
 second-person singular and plural (you)
 third-person singular human or animate female (she)
 third-person singular human or animate male (he)
 third-person singular inanimate (it)
 third-person plural (they)

Each pronoun has up to five forms:

  A form used as the subject of a finite verb (I/we) as cited above.
 An objective or oblique form (me/us/etc.) used as the object of a verb or of a preposition
 A reflexive form (myself/ourselves/etc.) which replaces the objective-case form in
referring to the same entity as the subject.
 And two possessive forms (my/our/etc. and mine/ours/etc.). These are used to stand for
the possessor of another noun — one that is used as a determiner, and one that is used as
a pronoun or a predicate adjective. The former are sometimes not included among the
pronouns, since they do not act as nouns, but have a role closer to that of adjectives.
Nevertheless, the term "pronoun" is frequently applied to both, at least informally. The
two sets of pronouns are sometimes distinguished with the terms "possessive
determiners" or "possessive adjectives", and "possessive pronouns", respectively.

[edit] Usage
In standard usage in English, every verb should have an explicit subject, except for an imperative
verb (a command) where the subject is always "you" (singular/plural), even when the context is
already understood, or could easily be understood by reading the sentences that follow.
Therefore, either an explicit noun, personal pronoun, relative pronoun, demonstrative pronoun,
interrogative pronoun, indefinite pronoun, reflexive pronoun, possessive pronoun or correlative
pronoun has to be supplied as the subject of a non-imperative verb. Personal pronouns,
demonstrative pronouns, reflexive pronouns and possessive pronouns typically also have explicit
antecedents when in the third person. Therefore one does not normally use the word "he" to refer
to somebody or "this" to refer to something if the person reading or hearing the phrase does not
know to whom one is referring.

However, once someone or something has been explicitly mentioned and can be easily identified
as the subject, the third person personal pronoun is usually used in place of it. Thus the subject is
often made explicit at its first occurrence in a paragraph, and subsequently substituted with its
personal pronoun.

In addition, personal pronouns must be in agreement with the correct gender and number of
people or objects being described. Using the word "it" in English to refer to a person, for
example, is usually considered extremely derogatory. It is generally not accepted to use a
singular version of a pronoun for a plural noun, and vice versa. An exception is the informal use
of "they" to refer to one person when sex is unknown: "If somebody took my book, they'd better
give it back" (see singular they).

Apart from "I" which is always capitalised, personal pronouns are generally lower-case letters
unless they are at the beginning of a sentence, unlike a proper noun for which the first letter is
capitalized. One notable exception is in some translations of the Christian Bible, in which the
first letter of the personal pronouns referring to either Jesus or God are capitalized.

In French, pronouns include "je", "nous", "tu", "vous", "ils", "elles", "lui", "toi", "moi", etc.
There are different pronouns used for different genders and numbers of people, and unlike
English where "them" and "they" are used for every object whether it is masculine or feminine,
in French the plural forms vary according to gender. In addition, in French, different pronouns
are used for indirect objects of a sentence than direct objects.

Interlingua pronouns also vary by number and gender: singular "io", "tu", and "ille", for example,
correspond with plural "nos", "vos", and "illes". Like French, Interlingua has different pronouns
for different genders and numbers. "Ille" and "illes" are masculine and general, for example,
while "illa" and "illas" are feminine. Unlike French, however, verbs remain the same for all
pronouns:
 "Illa lege un articulo" she is reading an article
"Illas lege articulos" they (feminine) are reading articles

[edit] Other types of personal pronouns

Pronouns usually show the basic distinctions of person (typically a three-way distinction between
first, second, and third persons) and number (typically singular vs. plural), but they may also
feature other categories such as case (nominative we vs. objective us in English), gender
(masculine he vs. feminine she in English), and animacy or humanness (human who vs.
nonhuman what in English). These can of course vary greatly. The English dialect spoken in
Dorset uses ee for animates and er for inanimates.

Many pronoun systems, including some used in Indo-European languages, (e.g., Ancient Greek)
have a dual number in addition to plural. This distinction existed in Anglo-Saxon but died out by
Middle English. Other examples of this in other language families include Classical Hebrew and
Arabic. In addition, the 'trial' (we three) is found in some languages.

Some languages distinguish between inclusive and exclusive first-person plural pronouns—those
that do and do not include their audience, respectively. For example, Tok Pisin has seven first-
person pronouns according to number (singular, dual, trial, plural) and
inclusiveness/exclusiveness, such as mitripela (they two and I) and yumitripela (you two and I).
This is common in languages spoken in traditional societies, such as Quechua and Melanesian
languages. This may be related to the existence of moieties in the culture.

Slavic languages have two different third-person genitive pronouns (one reflexive, one not). For
example, in Serbian:

Ana je dala Mariji svoju knjigu: Ana gave Maria her (reflexive) book; i.e., Ana gave her
own book to Maria.
Ana je dala Mariji njenu knjigu: Ana gave Maria her (non-reflexive) book; i.e., Ana
gave Maria's book to her.

The same phenomenon can be seen in North Germanic languages. For example, in Danish, this
is, respectively:

Anna gav Maria sin bog

Anna gav Maria hendes bog

The pronoun may encode politeness and formality. Many languages have different pronouns for
informal use or use among friends, and for formal use or use about/towards superiors, especially
in the second person. A common pattern is the so-called T-V distinction (named after the use of
pronouns beginning in t- and v- in Romance languages, as in French tu and vous).

It is very common for pronouns to show more grammatical distinctions than nouns. The
Romance languages (with the exception of Romanian) have lost the Latin grammatical case for
nouns, but preserve the distinction in the pronouns. The same holds for English with respect to
its Germanic ancestor.

It is also not uncommon for languages not to have third-person pronouns. In those cases the
usual way to refer to third persons is by using demonstratives or full noun phrases. Latin made
do without third-person pronouns, replacing them with demonstratives (which are in fact the
source of third-person pronouns in all Romance languages).
Some languages, such as Japanese and Korean, have pronouns that reflect deep-seated societal
categories. This is an extension of the politeness and formality distinctions found in other
languages. In these languages there is a small set of nouns that refer to the discourse participants.
These referential nouns are not usually used, with proper nouns, deictics, and titles being used
instead. Usually, once the topic is understood, no explicit reference is made at all. In Japanese
sentences, subjects are not obligatory, so the speaker chooses which word to use depending on
the rank, job, age, gender, etc. of the speaker and the addressee. For instance, in formal
situations, adults usually refer to themselves as watashi or the even more polite watakushi, while
young men may use the student-like boku and police officers may use honkan ("this officer"). In
informal situations, women may use the colloquial atashi, and men may use the rougher ore.

Other common distinctions made with personal pronouns found in the world's languages include:

 disjunctive pronouns;
 intensive pronouns;
 prepositional pronouns;
 direct and indirect object pronouns;
 reciprocal pronouns;
 weak pronouns.

[edit] Null-subject and pro-drop languages

Main articles: Pro-drop language and Null subject language

In some languages, a pronoun is required whenever a noun or noun phrase needs to be

referenced, and sometimes even when no such antecedent exists (cf the dummy pronoun in
English it rains). In many other languages, however, pronouns can be omitted when unnecessary
or when context makes it clear who or what is being talked about. Such languages are called
null-subject languages (when subject pronouns may be omitted), or pro-drop languages (when,
more generally, subject or object pronouns may be omitted). In some cases the information about
the antecedent is preserved in the verb, through its conjugation.

[edit] See also

 Clusivity
 Dummy pronoun
 Deixis
 Gender-neutral pronoun
 Gender-specific pronoun
 Gender neutral language
 Generic antecedents
 Grammatical gender
 Grammatical person
 Pronoun game

[edit] References
 Gaynesford, M. de (2006). I: The Meaning of the First Person Term. Oxford: Oxford
University Press. ISBN 0199287821.