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The interrogative words who, whom, whose, what and which are interrogative pronouns when used in the place of a noun or noun phrase. In the question Who is the leader?, the interrogative word who is a interrogative pronoun because it stands in the place of the noun or noun phrase the question prompts (e.g. the king or the woman with the crown).
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.
There is significant overlap between the English interrogative words and the English relative words, but the relative words that and while are not interrogative words, [c] and, in Standard English, what and how are mostly excluded from the relative words. [1]: 1053 Most or all of the archaic interrogative words are also relative words. [1]: 1046
"The interrogative pronoun hwā 'who, what' had only singular forms and also only distinguished between non-neuter and neuter, the neuter nominative form being hwæt". [14] Note that neuter and non-neuter refers to the grammatical gender system of the time, rather than the so-called natural gender system of today.
(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.
Moreover, the third-person personal pronouns, as well as interrogative and relative pronouns, were chosen according to the grammatical gender of their antecedent. Old English grammatical gender was, as in other Germanic languages , remarkably opaque: that is, one often could not know the gender of a noun by its meaning or by the form of the ...
An indeterminate pronoun is a pronoun which can show a variety of readings depending on the type of sentence it occurs in. The term "indeterminate pronoun" originates in Kuroda's (1965) thesis and is typically used in reference to wh-indeterminates, which are pronouns which function as an interrogative pronoun in questions, yet come to have additional meanings with other grammatical operators.
Interrogative sentences are generally divided between yes–no questions, which ask whether or not something is the case (and invite an answer of the yes/no type), and wh-questions, which specify the information being asked about using a word like which, who, how, etc.