Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language discusses the prescriptivist argument that they is a plural pronoun and that the use of they with a singular "antecedent" therefore violates the rule of agreement between antecedent and pronoun, but takes the view that they, though primarily plural, can also be singular in a secondary extended sense ...
Some people refuse to use the epicene pronoun they when referring to individuals on the basis that it is primarily a plural pronoun instead of a singular pronoun. [9] [10] [11] However, the online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary records usage of they "referring to an individual generically or indefinitely", with examples dating to 2008 ...
The word there is a dummy pronoun in some clauses, chiefly existential (There is no god) and presentational constructions (There appeared a cat on the window sill). The dummy subject takes the number (singular or plural) of the logical subject (complement), hence it takes a plural verb if the complement is plural.
“The English language is in need of a personal pronoun of the third person, singular number, that will indicate both sexes,” Young told Chicago Tribune reporters at the time.
When a language has gendered pronouns, the use of a particular word as a dummy pronoun may involve the selection of a particular gender, even though there is no noun to agree with. In languages with a neuter gender, a neuter pronoun is usually used, as in German es regnet ("it rains, it's raining"), where es is the neuter third person singular ...
English has three persons (first, second and third) and two numbers (singular and plural); in the third person singular there are also distinct pronoun forms for male, female and neuter gender. [2]: 52–53 Principal forms are shown in the adjacent table. English personal pronouns have two cases, subject and object.
Some [35] see the use of singular they to be a grammatical error, but according to most references, they, their and them have long been grammatically acceptable as gender-neutral singular pronouns in English, having been used in the singular continuously since the Middle Ages, including by a number of prominent authors, such as Geoffrey Chaucer ...
The 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 ...