Talk:English pronouns

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English Language

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Text and/or other creative content from [nil English grammar] was copied or moved into English pronouns. The former page's [ history] now serves to provide attribution for that content in the latter page, and it must not be deleted as long as the latter page exists.

Just one nugget among many

The article currently tells me that:

Those types that are indisputably pronouns are the personal pronouns, relative pronouns, interrogative pronouns, and reciprocal pronouns. The full set is presented in the following table along with dummy there. Nonstandard, informal and archaic forms are in italics.

And [unitalicized] that is given as a restrictive relative pronoun.

If I say "I don't know how this article became the mess that it is", what's restricted by the relative clause? (I suggest: Nothing. And therefore "restrictive" is a misnomer. True, I'm just a nobody with a net connection; but I can cite a reliable source that agrees with me.)

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language doesn't merely state that that isn't a pronoun; it argues that it isn't one. CamGEL may be wrong; but to say that that is indisputably a pronoun is clearly untrue.

I'd say that most English pronouns are outside any scale from formal to informal. If someone says "I'll phone you tomorrow", I can't think of any alternatives to "I" or "you" that would make the result more or less formal. Should "Nonstandard, informal and archaic forms are in italics" be instead "Nonstandard, markedly informal and archaic forms are in italics"? -- Hoary (talk) 11:42, 26 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Wiki Education assignment: ENGL A120 Critical Thinking

This article is currently the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 26 August 2024 and 11 December 2024. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): M1rodriguez312 (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by M1rodriguez312 (talk) 02:52, 30 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Nugget II

A table (declension) has columns for nominative, accusative, genitive and reflexive inflections. The "Accusative" column header has a link to the Accusative Case article, where it says "The accusative case is used...used to receive the direct object of a transitive verb." Which leaves no case available to receive the INdirect object of any verb. (Nor am I sure that "reflexive" really belongs there, or is another word altogether)

What "case" him in "Give him the book"?

It seems either a column (for dative?) is missing, or the "Accusative_Case" article is missing something. Captain Puget (talk) Captain Puget (talk) 19:55, 15 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Dative; it's implicitly "give the book to him"; see wikt:him#English — OwenBlacker (he/him; Talk) 23:33, 15 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

English pronouns have no dative form – they just have two case forms, here called nominative (he/she/they) and accusative (him/her/them).

As @Captain Puget: observes, the second case form is used for more syntactic functions than is the accusative in languages like Latin that have distinctive case forms for for each syntacitic function. This broader use of the accusative case form could be given some new term like "objective case," as in The Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (Quirk et al.) but commonly it's just called accusative case even though it serves multiple syntactic roles, as it is in Huddleston & Pullum's Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.

But even in Latin, cases don't map one-to-one to functions – the ablative case is used for multiple distinct functions, certain verbs take objects in the genitive rather than accusative, etc. English just takes this mismatch further, using the accusative case form for all non-subject functions.