📄️ Pronouns
We use pronouns in place of nouns and noun phrases:
📄️ Pronouns: indefinite (-body, -one, -thing, -where)
Somebody, anyone, everything, etc. are indefinite pronouns.
📄️ Pronouns: one, you, we, they
One, you, we and they are generic personal pronouns. We can use one, you, we and they to refer to ‘people in general’.
📄️ Pronouns: personal (I, me, you, him, it, they, etc.)
We use personal pronouns in place of noun phrases. We often use them to refer back to people and things that we have already identified (underlined):
📄️ Pronouns: possessive (my, mine, your, yours, etc.)
We use pronouns to refer to possession and ‘belonging’. There are two types
📄️ Pronouns: reflexive (myself, themselves, etc.)
Reflexive pronouns end in -self or -selves. They refer back to the subject forms of personal pronouns (underlined in the example below):
📄️ Questions: interrogative pronouns (what, who)
We use interrogative pronouns to ask questions. They are
📄️ Relative pronouns
Relative pronouns introduce relative clauses. The most common relative pronouns are who, whom, whose, which, that. The relative pronoun we use depends on what we are referring to and the type of relative clause.
📄️ Each
Each is a determiner or a pronoun.
📄️ Each other, one another
We use each other and one another to show that each person in a group of two or more people does something to the others. There is very little difference between each other and one another and we can normally use them in the same places. Each other is more common than one another:
📄️ Everyone, everybody, everything, everywhere
Everyone, everybody, everything and everywhere are indefinite pronouns.
📄️ It
We commonly use the pronoun it as both a subject and an object pronoun:
📄️ No one, nobody, nothing, nowhere
No one, nobody, nothing and nowhere are indefinite pronouns.
📄️ One
We commonly use one and its plural ones as a substitute for a countable noun:
📄️ One and one’s
As a personal pronoun (both subject and object), one can be used to refer to ‘people in general’. We often use one in making generalisations, especially in more formal styles. However, if one is used too much, it can make the speaker sound too formal. One takes a third person singular verb:
📄️ Someone, somebody, something, somewhere
Someone, somebody, something, somewhere are indefinite pronouns. They function in a similar way to some. We use them in affirmative clauses and in questions expecting a particular answer. We can use them to refer to both general and specific people or things. We use them with a singular verb:
📄️ That
That is a very common word in both writing and speaking. We use it as a determiner, a demonstrative pronoun and a relative pronoun. We also use it as a conjunction to introduce that\-clauses.