Grammatical categories of pronouns.
Lecture 5.
Theme. Notional parts of speech. The pronoun. The adjective.
1. General characteristics of English pronouns.
2. Classification of English pronouns.
3. Grammatical categories of pronouns.
4. Adjectives.
5. The grammatical category of degrees of comparison.
General characteristics of English pronouns .
Many scholars in the history of linguistics denied the very existence of pronouns as part of speech. But in present-day grammars pronouns are recognized as a part of speech. The meaning of pronouns as a part of speech can be stated as follows: pronouns point to the things, abstraction and properties without naming them.
Semantic features of the pronoun. Pronouns, unlike nouns or adjectives, do not denote substances or qualities, but they refer to the substances or qualities expressed by nouns and adjectives in the same context or situation. E.g. Peter went to Mary’s place yesterday. He (Peter) went to her (Mary’s) place yesterday as he (Peter) wanted to tell her (Mary) the news. According to their meaning pronouns are generally subdivided into: personal, possessive, demonstrative, indefinite, negative, reflexive, interrogative, reciprocal.
Morphological features of the pronoun. Pronouns, though not all of them, have the categories of number and case.
Syntactic features. Pronouns are used either absolutely or as a part of speech. eg. They wrote letters to each other. He wrote a letter to his brother. Either of them could have written this letter. (‘They’, ‘he’ – absolute use, ‘each’, ‘other’, ‘his’, ‘either’, ‘them’, ‘this’ – part of a phrase.) All pronouns with the exception of possessive, have the same form whether they are used absolutely or as a part of a phrase. As to the syntactical function some pronouns combine with verbs (he speaks, find him), while others can also combine with following noun (this room). In the sentence, some pronouns may be the subject (he, what) or the object, while others are the attribute (my). Pronouns can be predicative.
Classification of English pronouns.
Pronouns constitute a heterogeneous class of items with numerous subclasses. We usually find in grammars a classification of pronouns into personal (possessive, interrogative, indefinite, relative, etc.)
1. Personal.
We find the following personal pronouns in English:
I and we are said to be the pronouns of the 1st person (or persons) who speaks (speak).You is said to be the pronoun of the 2nd person; i.e. a person (persons) spoken to. He, she, it and they are said to be the pronouns of the 3rd person; i.e. a person (persons) or a thing (things) spoken about. We distinguish singular and plural personal pronouns.
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2. Possessive pronouns.
There are the following possessive pronouns in English: my, our, your, his, her, its, their.
Possessive pronouns serve to modify nouns in the sentence; i.e. they function as an attribute.
He took off his jacket and loosened his tie.
The possessive pronouns may perform noun functions as well. Then are used in their so-called absolute form: mine, yours, his, hers, its, ours, and theirs.
She put her arm through mine.
3. Reflexive pronouns.
The reflexive pronouns are formed by adding -self (in the plural –selves) to the possessive pronouns in the 1st and 2nd persons and to the objective case of the personal pronouns in the 3d person. Myself, ourselves, yourself, yourselves, himself, herself, itself, themselves. There is one more reflexive pronoun which is formed from the indefinite pronoun one-oneself. These pronouns are used as noun pronouns in the sentence. They are called reflexive pronouns, because they serve to show that the action performed by the person which is indicated by the subject of the sentence passes back again to the same person. In other words, the subject of the sentence and its object indicate the same person. In this case the reflexive pronouns are weakly stressed.
He wrapped himself in this blanket and fill off to sleep.
As is seen from the above example, the reflexive pronouns may serve in this sentence as different kinds of objects-direct, indirect and prepositional.
4. Emphatic pronouns.
Emphatic pronouns have the same forms as reflexive pronouns-they are homonyms. Emphatic pronouns are used for emphasis. They serve as noun pronouns and always perform the function of apposition in the sentence. They can be placed either immediately after this headword or at the end of the sentence. They are rendered in Russian as сам, сама ,само ,сами.
You yourself told them the story.
The emphatic pronouns are strongly stressed, nevertheless they can be omitted without destroying the sense of the sentence.
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5. Demonstrative pronouns.
There are four demonstrative pronouns in English: this, that, such and same. They all may be used as pronouns and as adjective pronouns. The pronouns this and that change for number. Their corresponding plural forms are these and those.
6. Indefinite pronouns.
The indefinite pronouns express various degree and various kinds of indefiniteness. We find the following subgroups among them:
1) indefinite pronouns proper:
a) some, any, no;
b) somebody, anybody, nobody;
someone, anyone, no one;
something, anything, nothing;
c) one, none;
2) distributive pronouns:
a) all, every, each, other, either, neither, both:
b) everybody, everyone, everything;
3) qualitative pronouns:
a) much, many, little, few, a little, a few, a lot of, lots of, a great deal, a great many, etc.
1. Reciprocal pronouns.
There are two reciprocal pronouns in English: each other and one other. They show that something is done mutually. Both pronouns are mainly used in the function of an object ( direct, indirect and prepositional) in the sentence.
I know that my two aunts bitterly disliked each other.
8. Interrogative pronouns.
The interrogative pronouns are: who(whom), whose, what, which, how much and how many. They are all used in forming questions.
How much did you find it?
9. Conjunctive or connective pronouns.
The pronouns who (whom), whose, what,which, how many, how much and that serve toconnect subordinate clauses with the principal clause. Owing to their auxiliary function they are called conjunctive pronouns. At the same time they all have an independent syntactic function in the subordinate clause.
Do you know who has bought the house? (subject)
Conjunctive pronouns may be used to introduce different kind of clauses, except adverbial clauses and appositive clauses, which are introduced only by conjunctions.
Grammatical categories of pronouns.
Grammatical category of case. In dealing with the category of case in pronouns, we must bear in mind that they need not to in this respect be similar to nouns. Some of them may, and indeed do, have peculiarities which no noun shares.
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Some pronouns distinguish between two cases which are best termed nominative and objective. These are the following:
Nominative: I he she (it) we (you) they who
Objective: me him her (it) us (you) them whom
No other pronoun, and, indeed, no other word in the language has that kind of case system.
A certain number of pronouns have a different case system. They distinguish between a common and a genitive case, in the same way as the nouns. These are, somebody, anybody, one, another, and a few more. All other pronouns have no category of case (something, anything, nothing, some, any, mine, hers, etc.)
Grammatical category of number. It will be easily seen that the category of number has only a very restricted field in pronouns. It is found in the pronouns this/these, that/those, other/others, (if not used before a noun).
As to the pronouns I/we; he, she, it/they, it must be stated that there is no grammatical category of number here. We is not a form of the pronoun I, but a separate word in its own right.
There is no grammatical category of number either in the pronouns my/our; his, her, its/their and mine/ours.
There are no other grammatical categories in the English pronouns; there is no category of gender.
Adjectives.
Adjectives are words expressing properties and characteristics of object (e.g. large, blue) and, hence, qualifying nouns.
Grammatically, four features are generally considered to be characteristic of adjectives:
1) their syntactic function of attribute;
2) their syntactic function of predicative;
3) their taking of adverbial modifier of degree (e.g. very)
4) their only grammatical category- the degrees of comparison.
However, not only adjectives possess all of the four features.
Many adjectives are formed from other parts of speech by adding different suffixes the most common of which are:
-able: comfortable
-ible: sensible
-ant: elegant
-ent: dependent
-al: cultural
-ic: atomic
-ish: childish
-ive: attractive
-ful: careful
-less: careless
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-ly: friendly
-ous: curious
-y: dirty
In English there is also a large number of adjectives ending in-ing and -ed.
His answer was (very) surprising.
All the adjectives are traditionally divided into two large subclasses: qualitative and relative.
Relative adjectives express such properties of a substance as are determined by the direct relation of the substance to some other substances. E.g. wood-a wooden hut, history- a historical event.
Qualitative adjectives, as different from relative ones, denote various qualities of substances which admit of a quantitative estimation, i.e. of establishing their correlative quantitative measure. The measure of a quality can be estimated as high or low adequate or inadequate, sufficient, optimal or excessive.
Cf: an awkward situation- a very awkward situation
In this connection the ability of an adjective to form degrees of comparison is usually taken as a formal sign of its qualitative character.
Adjective may serve in the sentence as:
1) an attribute, She had pleasant blue eyes.
2) a predicative, Her smile was almost professional.
3) part of a compound verbal predicate, He stood silent.
4) an objective predicative, I thought him very intelligent.
5) a subjective predicative, The door was closed tight.
6) an adverbial modifier, When ripe, the apples are sweet.
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