Pronoun (redirected from Prononmial)

pronoun, in English, the part of speech used as a substitute for an antecedent noun that is clearly understood, and with which it agrees in person, number, and gender. In English the pronouns are classified as personal (I, we, you, thou, he, she, it, they), demonstrative (this, these, that, those), relative (who, which, that, as), indefinite (e.g., each, all, everyone, either, one, both, any, such, somebody), interrogative (who, which, what), possessive, sometimes termed possessive adjectives (my, your, his, her, our, their), and reflexive (e.g., myself, herself). The case of the pronoun depends upon its function in the sentence structure.

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Pronoun 

a word that indicates an object or person without distinguishing any fixed characteristics of the object or person. The same pronoun may refer to any number of diverse objects and persons.

The most important pronouns refer to a speech situation or to an utterance itself: the first- and second-person pronouns (”I,” “we,” “you”) and their corresponding possessives, which refer to the speaker; deictic, or demonstrative, pronouns (”this,” “that”), which refer to a pointing gesture or sometimes only to an implied gesture by the speaker; and anaphoric pronouns (”he,” “she,” “it,” “they”), which refer to the preceding part of an utterance. In most languages, the same pronoun may be both deictic and anaphoric.

Reflexive pronouns (such as “myself,” “yourself,” “my own,” “your own”) indicate the identity of the object with the subject [”He hurt himself] or the reference of a given clause to the subject [”They have their own ideas”].

Relative pronouns (such as “which,” “who”) in a narrative sentence have an anaphoric function and also express the hypo-taxis of the subordinate to the main clause. Relative pronouns also include reciprocal pronouns (”each other,” “one another”).

Other words designating undefined objects or persons are also usually classed as pronouns; such words include indefinite pro-nouns (”someone,” “something”), negative pronouns (”nobody” and “nothing”), collective pronouns (”all”), intensive pronouns (”the very,” “another”), determinative pronouns (”each,” “any”), generic pronouns (German man, “one”), and interrogative pronouns (”who,” “what”).

The class of pronouns lacks grammatical and lexicosemantic unity but is traditionally studied separately in grammar, usually as a part of speech. The pronoun is the nucleus of the grammatical system of the noun \imia; in Russian linguistics, the general term for substantives, adjectives, and numerals]. As a rule, pro-nouns have all the grammatical categories of a noun \imia\, except for degrees of comparison. The pronoun or semantically equivalent elements exist in all languages.

REFERENCES

Maitinskaia, K. E. Mestoimeniia v iazykakh raznykh sistem. Moscow, 1969.
Benveniste, E. “La Nature des pronoms.” In For Roman Jakobson. The Hague, 1956.
Russell, B. An Inquiry Into Meaning and Truth. New York, 1967.

E. V. PADUCHEVA and V. M. ZHIVOV