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The following sentences give examples of particular types of pronouns used with antecedents: 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)
In English, pronouns mostly function as pro-forms, but there are pronouns that are not pro-forms and pro-forms that are not pronouns. [5]: 239 Pronouns can be pro-forms for non-noun phrases. For example, in I fixed the bike, which was quite a challenge, the relative pronoun which doesn't stand in for "the bike".
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 ...
The element in the main clause that the relative pronoun in the relative clause stands for (house in the above example) is the antecedent of that pronoun.In most cases the antecedent is a nominal (noun or noun phrase), though the pronoun can also refer to a whole proposition, as in "The train was late, which annoyed me greatly", where the antecedent of the relative pronoun which is the clause ...
Examples [5–7] show pro-forms that are not pronouns. In [5], did so is a verb phrase, but it stands in for "helped". Similarly, in [6], others is a common noun, not a pronoun, but the others stands in for this list of names of the other people involved (e.g., Sho, Alana, and Ali). And in [7], one is a common noun.
A pronoun can still carry gender even if it does not inflect for it; for example, in the French sentence je suis petit ("I am small") the speaker is male and so the pronoun je is masculine, whereas in je suis petite the speaker is female and the pronoun is treated as feminine, the feminine ending -e consequently being added to the predicate ...
For example, in the sentence "This is the man that I saw", there is a gap after the word saw. The shared noun phrase the man is understood to fill that gap ("I saw [the man]"). However, gapless relative clauses occur in non-standard English. One form of gapless relatives uses a resumptive pronoun.
The word there is used as a pronoun in some sentences, playing the role of a dummy subject, normally of an intransitive verb. The "logical subject" of the verb then appears as a complement after the verb. This use of there occurs most commonly with forms of the verb be in existential clauses, to refer to the presence or existence of something.