This is a closed word class.
A pronoun is a kind of noun.
Traditionally, a pronoun was said to be a word that stood for a noun, from the Latin pro, meaning "for" or "in place of". (Strictly speaking, a pronoun stands for a noun phrase - more about them later.)
Peter thought about Peter's mother a great deal. Peter remembered the first time Peter's mother took Peter to town, how Peter's mother took Peter's hand and helped Peter across the road. Whenever Peter and Peter's mother went to town, Peter's mother always bought Peter a Boston bun because Peter's mother knew how much Peter liked Boston buns.
Peter thought about his mother a great deal. He remembered the first time she took him to town, how she took his hand and helped him across the road. Whenever they went to town, she always bought him a Boston bun because she knew how much he liked them.
The examples in the second passage above are called personal pronouns.
The term first person refers to the speaker (or speakers).
The term second person is the person (or persons) being addressed.
The term third person is what is being spoken about (whether singular or plural, person or thing).
| Subject | Object | |||
| First person | ||||
| singular | I | me | ||
| plural | we | us | ||
| Second person | ||||
| singluar & plural | you | you | ||
| Third person | ||||
| singular | masculine | he | him | |
| feminine | she | her | ||
| non-personal | it | it | ||
| plural | they | them |
Pronouns belong to a closed word class.
There are very few of them (about sixty) compared with thousands of nouns.
Nouns are in the same form whether they are the subject or the object of a sentence.
Personal pronouns have different forms for subject and object.
In the third person singular, the personal pronoun must indicate gender.
In English, if you use nouns, you do not need to specify the gender of the person being spoken about. Once you use a pronoun, you must specify the gender of the person referred to.
In the past, the masculine pronoun was considered adequate for all situations where the gender of the person was not specified:
Every time a New Zealander pays his taxes, he helps his country.
Today, this usage is considered to be "sexist language". It can be avoided by using both pronouns:
Every time a New Zealander pays his or her taxes, he or she helps his or her country.
This construction can sound rather cumbersome. The problem can be avoided altogether by using the plural because this does not require any indication of gender:
Every time New Zealanders pay their taxes, they help their country.
Another option, used for centuries and now becoming acceptable again, is to use the plural they, their as the standard gender-neutral pronoun.
Someone has left his or her car lights on.
Someone has left their car lights on.
If any student wants to go to the football match, they should leave their name at the office.
This use of the plural pronoun has a very long history.
Every person [...] now recovered their liberty.
Goldsmith: History of England, 1771
"If everybody minded their own business," the Duchess said, "the world would go round a good deal faster than it does."
Lewis Carroll: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 1865
Another suggested solution has been the creation of a new gender-neutral pronoun, such as tey, co, E, ne, thon, mon, heesh, ho, hesh, et, hir, na, per, po, or hann.
None of these has ever had widespread support. Because the pronoun is a member of a closed word class, it will not admit newcomers easily.
In English, we have the single word "you" for both singular and plural.
However, many languages have different words. In French, for example:
| Singular: tu | Plural: vous |
Tu is familiar and used to address close friends and family, whereas vous is used not only as the plural but also as the singular in the more formal and polite usage.
At the time of Shakespeare, English also had two different second-person pronouns.
| Singular: thou | Plural: ye or you |
As with French vous, "you" was also the formal and more distant form for the singular. "Thou" was more intimate or was used by superior people when addressing those they considered inferior, such as servants. Understanding this distinction helps us to interpret the social relations and dimensions of power expressed in older texts that are otherwise obscure to us today.
Thou dost belie him, Percy, thou dost belie him;
He never did encounter with Glendower:
I tell thee,
He durst as well have met the devil alone
As Owen Glendower for an enemy.
Art thou not asham'd? But sirrah, henceforth
Let me not hear you speak of Mortimer:
Send me your prisoners with the speediest means [...]
(William Shakespeare: Henry IV, Part 1, Act 1, scene iii)
The King here is addressing Percy (also known as Hotspur) at first as an equal and friend by using the pronoun "thou". He then changes his tone, addresses him as "sirrah", which is more contemptuous than "Sir", and changes the pronoun to the "you" form when ordering him to send his prisoners; he is now speaking as a superior addressing a subordinate.
In Ireland and in parts of England, it is common to hear "you" as the singular and "yous" as the plural. The plural "yous" is also commonly heard in New Zealand in vernacular English. It is used in the everyday speech of many New Zealand speakers. Some New Zealand speakers use "you" for the singular and "you guys" or something similar for the plural. It has been suggested that the plural "yous" will eventually become part of standard English, though no doubt this will be resisted.
The uncertainty about how to spell "yous" (or "you's" or "youse") comes from the fact that this is primarily a spoken form, not a written form, so has not developed a conventional spelling.
Six-year-old Conor was listening intently to an explanation of a song in te reo Mâori that differentiated between one, two, three, or more persons - tênâ koe, tênâ korua, tênâ koutou. When he was singing, he said "yous" for the translation of "tênâ korua" and "tênâ koutou" - "greetings to yous", eyeballing the teacher to make sure she understood. At the conclusion he said, "You'll have to fix your chart 'cause in English one person is 'you', but two or more has an 's' and you say 'yous'".
Teacher in Mangere, Auckland
We have concentrated on the personal pronoun here. There are other categories of pronoun, which we give here for the sake of completeness.
Notice that there is some overlap between pronouns and determiners.
| Pronouns | This is for you. |
| Which is yours? | |
| Determiners | This car is for you. |
| Which book is yours? |
The reason is that some closed-class words can occur either before nouns (as determiners) or on their own (as pronouns).
Summary of Terms
| pronoun | personal pronoun | first person | second person |
| third person | gender | categories of pronoun: personal pronoun | possessive pronoun |
| relative pronoun | demonstrative pronoun | interrogative pronoun | reflexive pronoun |
| indefinite pronoun |
Exploring language content page
Exploring Language is reproduced by permission of the publishers Learning Media Limited on behalf of Ministry of Education, P O Box 3293, Wellington, New Zealand, © Crown, 1996.
Published on: 25 Feb 2009
