Pronouns
In the vaguest sense, pronouns are substitutions for nouns or noun phrases, with or without determiners. Pronouns come in many different flavours, including, but not limited to, personal pronouns (“I”, “you”, “he/she/it”, etc.), possessive pronouns (“mine”, “yours”), demonstrative pronouns (“that” and “this”), and so on. Wikipedia does a better job of describing pronouns than I, frankly, can be bothered to.
I won’t go into any great detail describing the different kinds of pronouns on this page; there’s plenty of text on the other pages for that. Instead, I’m quite content to merely link to the different pronoun pages from here:
- Personal pronouns – “I”, “you”, “he/she/it”, “we”, and so on; as well as the possessive forms of them, “my”, “your”, etc.
- Possessive pronouns – detached versions of the possessive personal pronouns, that is “mine”, “yours” and the rest.
- Reciprocal pronoun – “each other”, plain and simple.
- Demonstrative pronouns – used to point to specific entities: “that”, “those”, “this” and “these”.
- Indefinite pronouns – refer to general categories of people or things, “anyone”, “someone”, and the likes. There are also several non-pronoun words that inflect very similarly to indefinite pronouns which are discussed in this page as well.
- Relative pronouns – these are pronouns which are used to refer back to something that was mentioned in another clause.
- Interrogative pronouns – wait, what? how? where? who? What are these used for? Who came up with these? What does “interrogative” mean?
There is one semi-important thing I will mention here, however. Whereas nouns treat the genitive as a case that is separate from the five core cases and force the genitive noun to be in the same core case as the thing they’re modifying, pronouns do not. In all pronouns where the genitive is available, it is treated as if it were a core case, and the pronoun therefore does not follow the core case of whatever it’s modifying. Pronouns also lack the vocative case entirely.
