What are pronouns?
A pronoun is a word used instead of a noun.
A noun is a name. For example if we say “John cooked lunch.”
John is a noun because it is the name of the person in the sentence.
If we said “John cooked lunch and then John cleaned the kitchen” it would sound a bit strange because we are using the word ‘John’ twice in a sentence. To stop this repetition we can say.
“John cooked lunch and then he cleaned the kitchen”.
The word “he” means we do not use ‘John’ for a second time in one sentence.
‘He’ is a pronoun, a word which is used to replace a noun.
Subject pronouns
There are different types of pronouns but words like “I, We, You, He, She, It, They” are called “subject pronouns”
They are called “subject” pronouns because they refer to the “subject” of the sentence, that is the person or thing that does the action. For example we can say “Kate wrote the book” and Kate is the subject, the person who did the action. We can replace the noun Kate with the subject pronoun, ‘she‘.
Object pronouns
Object pronouns are used to describe people or things which have an action done to them. So for example if we were to say ‘John saw Christopher’, we cannot replace the word ‘Christopher’ with ‘he’ but have to put ‘him’.
‘He’ is a subject pronoun and ‘him’ is an object pronoun.
We have to say ‘John saw him’.
We cannot use object pronouns to refer to someone doing an action. So we cannot say ‘him wrote the book’, we have to say ‘he wrote the book’.
The object pronouns are as follows; me, us, you, him, her, it, them.
Possessive adjectives
The words; ‘my, our, your, his, her, its, their’ are called ‘possessive adjectives’.
They are still pronouns however, though they have the word ‘adjective’ in their name. They describe when something belongs to someone, for example, ‘This is David’s book and that’s his pen’.
The word ‘his’ tells us that the pen belongs to David.
Possessive pronouns.
The words; ‘mine, ours, yours, his, hers, its, theirs’ are called ‘possessive pronouns’.
Possessive pronouns are like possessive adjectives but they come after the noun. So we would not say ‘That is mine car’, but ‘That car is mine’
You can read more about them by clicking on this link.
Reflexive pronouns
The words; ‘myself, ourselves, yourself, yourselves, himself, herself, itself, themselves and themself’ are called ‘reflexive pronouns’.
They are used when the subject and the object are the same. For example ‘David saw himself in the mirror’. David did the action to ‘David’, so we use the reflexive pronoun, ‘himself’.
You has two reflexive pronouns.
Yourself is for one person. So we would say ‘How did you hurt yourself?’ to a friend.
Yourselves is for two or more people. ‘Students, did you see yourselves in the newspaper photo?’
They also has two reflexive pronouns.
Usually we say ‘themselves’, but we can say ‘themself’ when we are speaking in general about a person but do not say whether they are a man or woman. For example you could say ‘In life a person must try and help themself and not ask for help all the time.’
Here is a table of all .
You can remember them using the phrase ‘SORPP’
S- Subject pronouns
O – Object pronouns
R – Reflexive pronouns
P – Possessive adjectives
P – Possessive pronouns
