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Did you ever notice that we sometimes say things like, look at the baby. It's so cute. but we'd never say, look at her boyfriend. *It's so cute.
Did you ever notice that plural they is used to refer to anything from teachers to trees, but singular they is only for persons? If you doubt me, give it a try.
Did you ever notice that in some uses, whose is used to refer to anything from children to chambers (e.g., The chasm ran through a chamber whose ceiling was lost in the darkness above), but who is only for persons?
Did you ever notice that in some cases which can't be used for persons (e.g., that's the guy which sold me the car)?
Of course, everyone's aware of the masculine–feminine gender pronouns, but did you every think about the personal–non-personal gender pronouns?
Pronouns are a special kind of noun. They typically refer to another noun phrase that has come before or that comes later (e.g., in Xi saw the egg fall but caught it before it smashed, the pronoun it refers to the egg). There are only a small number of pronouns. The main ones are:
Pronouns in formal modern English .
| Nominative | Accusative | Reflexive | Independent genitive |
Dependent genitive | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| First-person | Singular | I | me | myself | mine | my | |
| Plural | we | us | ourselves | ours | our | ||
| Second-person | Singular | Standard | you | you | yourself | yours | your |
| Archaic | thou | thee | thyself | thine | thy | ||
| Plural | you | you | yourselves | yours | your | ||
| Third-person | Singular | Masculine | he | him | himself | his | his |
| Feminine | she | her | herself | hers | her | ||
| Neuter | it | it | itself | its | |||
| Epicene | they | them | themselves | theirs | their | ||
| Plural | they | them | themselves | theirs | their | ||
| Generic | one | one | oneself | one's | |||
| Wh- | Relative & interrogative |
Personal | who | whom | whose | whose | |
| Non-personal | what | what | |||||
| which | which | ||||||
| Reciprocal | each other one another |
each other's one another's |
each other's one another's | ||||
| Dummy | there it |
||||||
One interesting property of pronouns is that only a pronoun (but not all pronouns) can appear in a tag question such as that's very interesting, isn't it or there's more, isn't there?
There is a good deal of confusion about the words determiner and determinative. One is a category and one is a function. Unfortunately, some books use them one way, and some make the opposite choice. We will use determiner as a function (like modifier ) and determinative as a category (like adjective).
In general, a reliable dictionary for checking whether a word is a determinative is the Simple English Wiktionary, although, confusingly, it calls them determiners.
For the most part, determinative phrases (DPs) tend to be single-word phrases. Occasionally though, a DP includes a modifier. In the following examples, the modifier is in bold.
Remember for the terms:
The function that determiners typically perform is that of determiner. Only NPs have determiners, and a head noun may only have one determiner (the ball) or none (balls), never two or more (*the my ball). A singular countable noun typically requires a determiner to be a full NP, and without it, it is usually ungrammatical (e.g., *she passed me ball).
In traditional English grammar, there is no concept of determiner or determinative. There was a special category for the and a called articles, but all the other determinatives were just called "adjectives". The word some in some people was called an adjective, even though it has none of the other characteristics of adjectives, just because it came before a noun. There are two reasonably good ways to distinguish whether a word is a determinative or an adjective.
And, of course, you can look at the list of determinatives because there aren't very many.
Like pronouns, determinatives can often refer to NPs that appear elsewhere in the discourse (e.g., I bought a bag of chocolate chip cookies, and I ate some on the way home.) For this reason, they are often categorized as pronouns. Determinatives don't have the various forms that most pronouns have and as with adjectives, they cannot appear in the frame __ of the __, shown above (e.g, *she of the students or *us of the teachers).
A given noun phrase (NP) is either definite of indefinite. In English, this is usually marked by the choice of determiner (the function). Certain determinatives, such as the and this along with possessive (genitive) NPs, such as my and Brett's mark the NP as definite. Other determinatives such as a and any mark the NP as indefinite. And most NPs without a determiner are also indefinite. The main exceptions here are proper nouns and most pronouns, which are definite.
Definiteness is one of those concepts that seems obvious at first blush but which, on second thought, turns out to be less clear. A useful if somewhat simplified way to think out it is found in The Cambridge grammar of the English language (Huddleston & Pullum, 2002, p. 368). They say it can be understood as pre-empting a question with which? The following is quoted:
Compare, for example:
[2] i Where did you park the car?
ii The father of one of my students rang me up last night.
iii The first person to run the mile in under four minutes was Roger Bannister.
Example [i] illustrates the frequent case where the addressee can be assumed to be familiar with the referent of the definite NP: you have been driving the car and presumably know a good deal more about it than that it is a car – what colour and make of car it is, and so on. You thus don't need to ask Which car?: you know which one I'm referring to. (If you did respond to my utterance of [2i] by asking Which one?, this would indicate that there had been a breakdown in communication, that I had been mistaken in assuming that you would be able to identify which car I was referring to.)
Familiarity of this kind is not, however, a necessary condition for the felicitous use of the. In [2ii], for example, I don't say who the student is and so can't expect you to know who the father is. Nevertheless, I have a particular student in mind and the property of being father of that student provides distinctive, hence identifying, information about the referent. It wouldn't make sense, therefore, to ask #Which father of one of your students? (Which one of your students? would of course make sense, but the which question here relates to the embedded NP one of my students, which is indefinite.)
Definiteness can be a trouble point for learners of English because every NP in English is marked as definite or indefinite, while marking is optional in many languages. Moreover, the choice of determiner is only partially conditioned by definiteness. Countability, quantity, number, proximity, and possession all factor in.
From The love of a good woman by Alice Munro.