English personal pronounsThe English personal pronouns are a subset of English pronouns taking various forms according to number, person, case and grammatical gender. Modern English has very little inflection of nouns or adjectives, to the point where some authors describe it as an analytic language, but the Modern English system of personal pronouns has preserved some of the inflectional complexity of Old English and Middle English.
He (pronoun)In Modern English, he is a singular, masculine, third-person pronoun. In Standard Modern English, he has four shapes representing five distinct word forms: he: the nominative (subjective) form him: the accusative (objective) form (also called the oblique case) his: the dependent and independent genitive (possessive) forms himself: the reflexive form Old English had a single third-person pronoun — from the Proto-Germanic demonstrative base *khi-, from PIE *ko- "this" — which had a plural and three genders in the singular.
English determinersEnglish determiners (also known as determinatives) are words – such as the, a, each, some, which, this, and six – that are most commonly used with nouns to specify their referents. The determiners form a closed in English. The syntactic role characteristically performed by determiners is known as the determinative function (see ). A determinative combines with a noun (or, more formally, a nominal; see ) to form a noun phrase (NP). This function typically comes before any modifiers in the NP (e.g.
One (pronoun)One is an English language, gender-neutral, indefinite pronoun that means, roughly, "a person". For purposes of verb agreement it is a third-person singular pronoun, though it sometimes appears with first- or second-person reference. It is sometimes called an impersonal pronoun. It is more or less equivalent to the Scots "a body", the French pronoun on, the German/Scandinavian man, and the Spanish uno. It can take the possessive form one's and the reflexive form oneself, or it can adopt those forms from the generic he with his and himself.
English pronounsThe English pronouns form a relatively small category of words in Modern English whose primary semantic function is that of a pro-form for a noun phrase. Traditional grammars consider them to be a distinct part of speech, while most modern grammars see them as a subcategory of noun, contrasting with common and proper nouns. Still others see them as a subcategory of determiner (see the DP hypothesis). In this article, they are treated as a subtype of the noun category.
Gender neutrality in languages with gendered third-person pronounsA third-person pronoun is a pronoun that refers to an entity other than the speaker or listener. Some languages with gender-specific pronouns have them as part of a grammatical gender system, a system of agreement where most or all nouns have a value for this grammatical category. A few languages with gender-specific pronouns, such as English, Afrikaans, Defaka, Khmu, Malayalam, Tamil, and Yazgulyam, lack grammatical gender; in such languages, gender usually adheres to "natural gender", which is often based on biological sex.
YouIn Modern English, you is the second-person pronoun. It is grammatically plural, and was historically used only for the dative case, but in most modern dialects is used for all cases and numbers. You comes from the Proto-Germanic demonstrative base *juz-, *iwwiz from Proto-Indo-European *yu- (second-person plural pronoun). Old English had singular, dual, and plural second-person pronouns. The dual form was lost by the twelfth century, and the singular form was lost by the early 1600s.
Singular theySingular they, along with its inflected or derivative forms, them, their, theirs and themselves (also themself, and theirself), is a gender-neutral third-person pronoun. It typically occurs with an indeterminate antecedent, in sentences such as: "Somebody left their umbrella in the office. Could you please let them know where they can get it?" "My personal rule is to never trust anyone who says that they had a good time in high school." "The patient should be told at the outset how much they will be required to pay.
Personal pronounPersonal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person (as I), second person (as you), or third person (as he, she, it, they). Personal pronouns may also take different forms depending on number (usually singular or plural), grammatical or natural gender, case, and formality. The term "personal" is used here purely to signify the grammatical sense; personal pronouns are not limited to people and can also refer to animals and objects (as the English personal pronoun it usually does).
PronounIn linguistics and grammar, a pronoun (abbreviated ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase. Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not consider them to form a single class, in view of the variety of functions they perform cross-linguistically. An example of a pronoun is "you", which can be either singular or plural. Subtypes include personal and possessive pronouns, reflexive and reciprocal pronouns, demonstrative pronouns, relative and interrogative pronouns, and indefinite pronouns.
