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The 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. [1] 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.
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun (glossed PRO) 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.
In linguistics, morphology (mor-FOL-ə-jee [1]) is the study of words, including the principles by which they are formed, and how they relate to one another within a language. [2] [3] Most approaches to morphology investigate the structure of words in terms of morphemes, which are the smallest units in a language with some independent meaning.
Subsequently, morphology (i.e. the study of structure and formation of words) and phonology (i.e. the study of organization of sounds in languages) were relegated in importance. [ 94 ] American linguist Norbert Hornstein wrote that before Syntactic Structures , linguistic research was overly preoccupied with creating hierarchies and categories ...
The personal pronouns of Modern English retain morphological case more strongly than any other word class (a remnant of the more extensive case system of Old English). For other pronouns, and all nouns, adjectives, and articles, grammatical function is indicated only by word order, by prepositions, and by the "Saxon genitive" (-'s). [a]
The possessive form of an English noun, or more generally a noun phrase, is made by suffixing a morpheme which is represented orthographically as ' s (the letter s preceded by an apostrophe), and is pronounced in the same way as the regular English plural ending (e)s: namely, as / ɪ z / when following a sibilant sound (/ s /, / z /, / ʃ /, / ʒ /, / tʃ / or / dʒ /), as / s / when following ...
Morphology, by contrast, refers to the structure at and below the word level (for example, how compound words are formed), but above the level of individual sounds, which, like intonation, are in the domain of phonology. [12]
(The pronoun one is an exception, as in I like those ones.) English pronouns are also more limited than common nouns in their ability to take dependents. For instance, while common nouns can often be preceded by a determinative (e.g., the car), pronouns cannot. [7] In English conversation, pronouns are roughly as frequent as other nouns.