Definition:
A pronoun that refers to a particular person, group, or thing. These are the personal pronouns in English:
- I, me, my, mine
- we, us, our, ours
- you, your, yours
- he, she, it, him, her, his, hers, its
- they, them, their, theirs
Examples and Observations:
- "Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much."
(Oscar Wilde) - "From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it."
(Groucho Marx) - "I stopped believing in Santa Claus when my mother took me to see him in a department store, and he asked for my autograph."
(Shirley Temple) - "Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose with the exception of guppies, who like to eat theirs."
(P. J. O'Rourke) - "I got kicked out of ballet class because I pulled a groin muscle. It wasn't mine."
(Rita Rudner) - "Personal pronouns are most typically used for backward (anaphoric) reference:
The manager phoned me back. He was extremely apologetic.
Occasionally a personal pronoun may be used to refer forward (cataphorically). Such uses are common in openings to written stories:She was walking along a tree-lined suburban road, unaware of what was about to befall her. Gillian Dawson had never been very aware of the people around her."
(Ronald Carter and Michael McCarthy, Cambridge Grammar of English, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006) - "All of the personal pronouns except you have distinct forms signaling number, either singular or plural. Only the third-person singular pronouns have distinct forms signaling gender: masculine (he, him), feminine (she, her), and neuter (it). . . .
"Pronouns inflect for case to show whether they are functioning as subjects of sentences or as objects of verbs or prepositions."
(T. Klammer and M. Schulz, Analyzing English Grammar, Allyn and Bacon, 1992)
