Boring nerdy grammar stuff
Time for an English lesson :D
ProNouns is much more useful if you understand what it's actually doing. This page aims to cover everything grammatical that you need to know, starting with the absolute basics and building up.
This page doesn't touch on the gender-expression-related aspects of pronouns, just grammar.
What is a pronoun?
- pronoun
(noun) a word that is used instead of a noun or a noun phrase. Cambridge English Dictionary
Let's look at a basic sentence, but without any pronouns.
Lucy has spent the last three hours writing about grammar. Lucy is very tired and Lucy would love to go to bed.
It's awkward having to refer to our subject over and over again by name, so we drop in a pronoun to make the sentence flow better.
Lucy has spent the last three hours writing about grammar. She is very tired and she would love to go to bed.
Different pronouns for different places
Let's look at a slightly more complex example.
She sounds really cool. I'd love to meet her.
Now we have two different pronouns for the same person - what's going on there? To understand this, we need to understand that there are three parts to every sentence:
the subject - the person/animal/thing/etc carrying out an action
the verb - what the subject is doing
(sometimes) the object - what the subject is doing the thing to
We use different pronouns depending on if we're talking about the subject or the object.
She sounds really cool - we're referring to the subject, so we use the subjective pronoun
I'd love to meet her. - we're referring to the object, so we use the objective pronoun
Here are all the types you need to care about:
Type | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|
Personal subjective | Referring to the subject | She sounds really cool. |
Personal objective | Referring to the object | I'd love to meet her. |
Possessive | Indicates possession | This server is hers. |
Possessive adjective | Indicates possession (technically not a pronoun but it behaves similarly) | That's her car. |
Reflexive | When the subject and the object are the same | She should be proud of herself |
There are more types of pronoun, but they're not relevant to us as they don't change depending on the person using them.
Verbs and stuff
So far we've established that we can use pronouns to replace regular nouns or noun phrases, and they change depending on the context we use them.
So we could take the sentence Lucy is very cool
and drop in She is very cool
or They is very cool -
-oh. "They is" doesn't quite seem right. To understand why, we need to talk about verb forms and conjugation.
Verbs come in many forms, but most start life in the infinitive form. This form usually starts with "to ", for example "to have", "to be", "to go", etc.
To make them usable in a sentence, we need to take them out of the infinitive - this is called conjugation.
As far as ProNouns is concerned (it has no use case for things like the first person so just ignores it), there are two ways to conjugate a verb in any given tense:
singular - traditionally used when referring to another individual i.e. she has, he is
plural - traditionally used when referring to yourself or a group of people i.e. they have
The advent of singular they, along with some neopronouns, means that the words "singular" and "plural" don't carry much meaning anymore, but every set falls into one of those categories.