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Almost any syntactic category can serve as the antecedent to a pro-form. The following examples illustrate a range of proforms and their antecedents. The pro-forms are in bold, and their antecedents are underlined: a. Willy said he likes chocolate. - Noun as antecedent b. My eccentric uncle likes chocolate. He tells everyone to buy him chocolate.
He had three genders in Old English, but in Middle English, the neuter and feminine genders split off. Today, he is the only masculine pronoun in English. In the 18th century, it was suggested as a gender-neutral pronoun, and was thereafter often prescribed in manuals of style and school textbooks until the 1960s. [6]
Third-person personal pronouns, and sometimes others, often have an explicit antecedent – a noun phrase which refers to the same person or thing as the pronoun (see anaphora). The antecedent usually precedes the pronoun, either in the same sentence or in a previous sentence (although in some cases the pronoun may come before the antecedent ...
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 ...
Third-person personal pronouns: That poor man looks as if he needs a new coat. (the noun phrase that poor man is the antecedent of he) Julia arrived yesterday. I met her at the station. (Julia is the antecedent of her) When they saw us, the lions began roaring (the lions is the antecedent of they; as it comes after the pronoun it may be called ...
While the usual pronouns of “He,” “She” or even “They” are used to describe whether someone is masculine or feminine, the use of neopronouns may “express a person’s identity in a ...
Normally, a singular antecedent requires a singular pronoun. But because he is no longer universally accepted as a generic pronoun referring to a person of unspecified gender, people commonly (in speech and in informal writing) substitute the third-person-plural pronouns they, them, their, and themselves (or the nonstandard singular themself ...
Agreement between pronoun (or corresponding possessive adjective) and antecedent also requires the selection of the correct person. For example, if the antecedent is the first person noun phrase Mary and I , then a first person pronoun ( we/us/our ) is required; however, most noun phrases ( the dog , my cats , Jack and Jill , etc.) are third ...