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Indefinite pronouns are in contrast to definite pronouns. Indefinite pronouns can represent either count nouns or noncount nouns . They often have related forms across these categories: universal (such as everyone , everything ), assertive existential (such as somebody , something ), elective existential (such as anyone , anything ), and ...
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.
However, when referring to previously unmentioned groups of people or when referring to people in a generic way, especially when using an indefinite pronoun like 'some' or 'all', the masculine plural is used. For example: Sumir (M.PL) hafa þann sið að tala við sjálfa (M.PL) sig. 'Some people have the habit of talking to themselves.'
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 ...
Grammatical abbreviations are generally written in full or small caps to visually distinguish them from the translations of lexical words. For instance, capital or small-cap PAST (frequently abbreviated to PST) glosses a grammatical past-tense morpheme, while lower-case 'past' would be a literal translation of a word with that meaning.
Personal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person (as I), second person (as you), or third person (as he, she, it). Personal pronouns may also take different forms depending on number (usually singular or plural), grammatical or natural gender, case, and formality.
For details, see English personal pronouns. Other possessive determiners (although they may not always be classed as such though they play the same role in syntax) are the words and phrases formed by attaching the clitic-'s (or sometimes just an apostrophe after -s) to indefinite pronouns, nouns or noun phrases (sometimes called determiner ...
A difficulty with this reasoning, however, is posed by indefinite pronouns (one, few, many), which can easily appear together with a determiner, e.g. the old one. The DP-analysis must therefore draw a distinction between definite and indefinite pronouns, whereby definite pronouns are classified as determiners, but indefinite pronouns as nouns.