Questions tagged [pronouns]
A (usually closed) class of words that can replace nouns.
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Is there any language that uses different pronouns for "we" depending on whether the spoken to person is included in the group?
As in "we are going out tonight" using a different word for "we" depending on whether you mean "me and some other people" or "you and me (and potentially other people as well)".
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Are there languages that don't have this kind of ambiguity?
In the sentence "John told James that he's happy.", the pronoun "he" is ambiguous, since it could refer to either John or James.
Are there any languages which try to solve this ...
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What languages lack personal pronouns, and why?
The Japanese language lacks personal pronouns in the IE sense. Japanese is very pro-drop, and often sentences will be constructed so personal pronouns do not appear, and the agents which the pronouns ...
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Is there a language where there are personal pronouns for the first or second person that have gender?
Is there a language where there are personal pronouns for the first or second person that have gender? Like a feminine "I" or a masculine "you".
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Is there a technical name for when languages use masculine pronouns to refer to both men and women?
I know a little Arabic, and I also know English. They both have the notion of "gender" built into their syntax. I am Persian and I speak Farsi, which does not have "gender" built ...
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Is there a language without gender in third person pronouns?
English (as most Indo-European languages) has a gender-neutral third person pronoun, it, but it is typically not used for people; if one wants to be gender neutral, one is often stuck using he or she.
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Do any languages mark social distinctions other than gender and status?
Many languages have pronouns that reflect gender, and some have pronouns that reflect relative social hierarchy or formality. (To pick an example I actually know, in Dutch the second person singular ...
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Are there any languages that have a pronoun which is only used to refer to royalty?
I can recall reading an article years ago which claimed that some languages have unused "royal" pronouns. That is, these pronouns were only used to refer to royalty as a show of respect or ...
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Does Japanese have pronouns?
It is often said that Japanese doesn't really have a pronoun word class, such as in the Wikipedia article on Japanese Grammar:
Although many grammars and textbooks mention pronouns (代名詞 daimeishi), ...
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Are there any fundamental differences in personal pronoun acquisition across languages?
I am interest in reversal errors in personal pronoun acquisition. My knowledge comes mostly from studies done with English-speaking children, and I was wondering if there is any languages where this ...
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Is English unusual in having no second person plural form?
In Spanish, there are the "vosotros" (only used in Spain) and "ustedes" (formal in Spain) forms for use when talking to a group of people. These also use specific conjugations different different from ...
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Has any language ever borrowed an interrogative or relative pronoun?
One of the lexical similarities between reconstructed Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Uralic is in the interrogative and relative pronouns. For the former, in PIE there's a family of interrogatives ...
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Are the Finnish pronouns related to their Indo-European counterparts?
Although not belonging to the Indo-European family, Finnish has personal pronouns that resemble (to a layperson, at least) the corresponding pronouns in Indo-European languages. For example, the ...
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Why did English stop using thou?
In Shakespearean English, thou/thee/thy/thine were used for second person singular, and you/your/yours were used for second person plural. In modern English, you is used for both singular and plural. ...
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Pronoun introduced before its antecedent
I was speaking to a college-educated American woman in her 80s, born and raised in the metropolitan east coast of the United States.
We were on a new topic, and without any preceding context, she ...
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What is the origin of the "redundant" pronouns in the Venetian language?
From the examples taken from Wikipedia:
• Venetian: (Ti) te jèra onto or even Ti te jèri/xeri onto (lit. "(You) you were dirty").
• Venetian: El can el jèra onto (lit. "The dog he was dirty").
It ...
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Do any languages form plural pronouns by adding a suffix to the singular form?
Are there languages whose plural pronouns ('we', 'they', etc.) are formed from singular pronouns ('I', 'he', etc.) plus a plural marker?
For example, if English were such a language, instead of "we" ...
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Universals and emphatic pronouns
In (spoken) English, the object pronouns "me/you/her/him/us/them" are, in some sense, the "unmarked" pronouns. (I only claim native knowledge of English as it is spoken in parts of the US). By this I ...
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Are there any natural languages that mark the distinction between cataphoric and anaphoric pronouns?
Are there any natural languages that mark the distinction between cataphoric and anaphoric pronouns?
Just to make sure I got the terms straight, I looked up “cataphora” and its opposite, “anaphora,” ...
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Etymology of impersonal pronoun "one"
The 'impersonal' pronoun in Germanic and Romance languages seems to come from one of two paths:
Cognate with the word for 'man'
Proto-Germanic: *mann-
Dutch: men
German: man
Old English: man (< ...
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Can the /m/ sound in a 1st person pronoun be considered a linguistic universal?
For example,
english: me, mine, my
Russian: мне, меня, мой
Estonian: mina, mind, mulle
How prevalent is this in world's languages and what should it be attributed to?
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How can you establish that a word is a proform?
A pro-form is a word, substituting for other words, phrases, clauses, or sentences, whose meaning is recoverable from the linguistic or extralinguistic context.
But how do you establish a word as a ...
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Why do PIE verbs have suffixes -m-, -s-, -t-, while personal pronouns have m-, t-, s-?
Usually it is assumed that in PIE the verb forms for the singular first, second, and third person are respectively -m-, -s-, -t- (cfr. Latin).
The personal pronouns, instead, have the second and ...
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How does the reaction against gender-specific pronouns relate to a languages' use of gender?
This is a question out of gross ignorance, so I may be way off the mark here. If that's the case, the answer should be easy to provide in the negative.
My background
I'm an American, I spent the first ...
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Personal vs. Demonstrative Pronouns
I've read in a number of places (e.g. Wikipedia) that Proto-Indo-European had first and second-person personal pronouns, but no third-person pronouns. Instead, a system of anaphoric demonstrative ...
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Are there languages where pronouns are marked entirely with conjugations?
I know of languages (Arabic in particular comes to mind) where the subject pronoun can be dropped because verb conjugation encodes at least as much information as a pronoun might. I also know that ...
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Why do two English personal pronouns — "you" and "it" — lack an objective case?
Most English person pronouns have an objective case — I/me, we/us, thou/thee, he/him, she/her, they/them, who/whom. But "you" and "it" have no such form. Did they every have one? ...
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Is there any fusional language where pronouns and nouns share the same declension?
Some analytic languages sometimes use the same prepositions for nouns and pronouns,e.g.
'I'm proud OF him' vs. 'I'm proud OF his book'.
Agglutinative languages may use the same affix for nouns and ...
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Plural form as respect form - based on what?
Many languages use the plural as respected mood for a singular (even English use "you" which is basically a plural form of thu).
Now my question is: based on what those who started to speak in ...
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Are there any languages with second-person pronouns marked for a proximal/distal distinction?
I am curious if there are any natural languages where the personal pronoun used to refer to the addressee varies in some way depending on their distance to the speaker. For instance, one form might be ...
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"She" and "they" in West Germanic languages
In English, the third person singular feminine subject pronoun (she) and the third person plural subject pronoun (they) are phonetically different. However, they are phonetically the same in some West ...
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Is there any dialect of English with clusivity?
What it says on the tin. The closest thing that I'm aware of is in Tok Pisin, a creole language which involved English in its creation, which distinguishes “we without you” (mipela) from “we with you” ...
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What is the function of a gender distinction in nouns?
In German and some other languages, I understand there are different forms of the definite article 'the' depending on the gender of the noun. Also personal pronouns have different forms depending on ...
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The meaning of "what"?
"What" is defined grammatically as an interrogative pronoun
... used interrogatively in asking for the specification of an identity, quantity, quality, etc. (Wiktionary)
In dictionaries, however, ...
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What is the name for the phenomenon or process by which the brain knows what "it" in a sentence refers to?
What is the name for the phenomenon or process by which the brain knows what "it" in a sentence refers to ?
For example : I left my book on the table but when I came back, IT wasn't there.
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Difference between Genitive Personal Pronoun and Possessive Pronoun
I'm currently studying Icelandic. Right away at one of the first steps I found a bit of difficulty and I wonder if any of you might be able to help me as the question might be answered based on any ...
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How did the Portuguese pronoun "se" take on these other functions?
In Portuguese, the third person accusative pronoun se ("himself/herself/itself/themselves") can be used for four different purposes:
1.) Most straightforwardly, as a reflexive pronoun:
Mantém-se ...
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On the use of possessive pronouns instead of definite articles in AmE
Consider the following examples:
I have to go now, my Uber driver has arrived.
So, have you already learned your ABCs?
I now will put my eggs into the dry ingredients.
All of these are examples of a ...
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Is there a language without words which correspond to the concepts 'I', 'They', 'We'
I was wondering if a language exists without the ability to express the notions of 'I', 'We', 'they' etc.
Would it be possible to communicate without these concepts being expressible as a ...
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Are there any examples of neopronouns for non-binary or third gender people being fully incorporated into a language's grammar?
Many non-binary people now request that new third person pronouns (neopronouns) be used to refer to them, for example xe or ze. These have not been widely used by English speakers yet, but it's still ...
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Gender-specific pronouns in languages without grammatical gender?
There are various discussions, also on SE network, about the usage of "gender-neutral" language, where most controversies arise around using the pronoun "he" to address any user.
Such problems are ...
user1609
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'm' in the words meaning first person
I have read in a book about the theory that explains why in many languages pronouns meaning first person contain letter 'm' (e.g. me, moi, меня, mich) and pronouns describing second person contain ...
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why in Polish we change ją to jej when negating the phrase?
ja lubię ją - I like her
ja nie lubię jej - I do not like her
Do I understand correctly what these sentences mean?
If yes, why do we change ją to jej when negating the phrase? In both cases the ...
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What is the name of this class of grammatical modifiers?
In French (and many other languages), adjectives and pronouns have different classes, e.g.:
Adjectives
demonstrative
indefinite
interrogative
numerical
possessive
Pronouns
demonstrative
indefinite
...
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Are deictic pronouns at all apparent in written language?
Considering the nature of deixis, I have trouble coming up with written examples where the pronoun is of a deictic nature, other than quotes from speech etc. Or maybe I have misunderstood the meaning ...
user1750
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Portuguese: Inconsistencies in use of second person pronouns and conjugation
I observed that both colloquial Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese show some inconsistencies in the way they use the second person pronoun (or its conjugation) and would like to know if my ...
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2nd person convergence in other languages than English
Besides English, is there any other language where the 2nd person singular converges with the second person plural?
And is there any other language where the informal singular 2nd person converges ...
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Is 'It' anaphoric or cataphoric, and what is its antecedent/postcedent?
Question 1a: What does 'It' refer to in the following sentence:
It was clearly in the mood to place acknowledgements at the bottom of questions.
The context for the above sentence is provided in ...
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Are personal pronouns in English different lexemes or just inflected forms of the same one?
Take for example the words 'I' and 'you' (or 'I' and 'we'). Is it more reasonable to analyze them as different lexemes, or as different forms of a same lexeme inflected for grammatical person (or ...
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what's this linguistic phenomenon?
I am currently working on coding and standardizing the language of my community.
There is something we do when we speak, that so far I haven't encountered in the other languages that I've delved into, ...
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