The personal pronoun can be the nucleus of the subject.
Personal pronouns are those that usually refer to people, animals or objects and that do not have lexical content. These pronouns express various grammatical categories, the most common being those that indicate the grammatical person . Personal pronouns can also distinguish grammatical number (singular or plural) and grammatical gender ,
It should be noted that pronoun is a term that comes, etymologically speaking, from Latin. More precisely, it emanates from the sum of two Latin particles: the prefix pro- , which is equivalent to “in front” , and the noun nomen , which can be translated as “name” .
A pronoun is a type of word without a fixed referent. Pronouns are determined according to the relationship they establish with other words that have already been named, and can refer to extralinguistic people or things.
Personal , on the other hand, is a concept that arose from the Latin word personalis . This, in turn, is made up of two components: person and the suffix -al , which means “relative to” .
Examples of personal pronouns
"I", "us", "he", "you" y "you" son ejemplos de pronombres personales. La expresión “I am a lawyer and I work in a downtown law firm.” tiene sentido según la persona que pronuncia la frase.
In this context, the personal pronoun “I” indicates that the person making the comment is a “lawyer.” If a person wants to comment that another subject is a “lawyer,” they will have to say, depending on the context, “He is a lawyer,” “You are a lawyer,” etc.
Another possibility is that the speaker is a “lawyer” and wants to include another colleague in his expression. In that case, you can express “We are lawyers” , which is equivalent to “He and I are lawyers” .
As can be seen in these cases, the personal pronoun often allows the person to be replaced, who is not named. Instead of saying "Mariano is a lawyer" , you can comment "He is a lawyer" .
Let's look at another example. Someone may express: "You are a great friend." In this way, you are telling your interlocutor how you consider or rate them. In countries where voseo is used, the personal pronoun "you" is replaced by "vos" , while "you are" is replaced with "sos" : "You are a great friend" .
"You go into the restaurant, I'll stay outside waiting for Jorge" is a sentence that includes the personal pronouns "you" and "I." The speaker gives an indication to those listening to him ( "you enter the restaurant..." ) and clarifies that he himself will carry out a different action ( "... I will stay outside waiting for Jorge" ).
There must be an agreement between the personal pronoun and the grammatical person.
More information of interest
There are other interesting facts that are worth knowing about personal pronouns. Among the most significant specifications are the following:
- Of the first person, there is the "I" in the singular as well as the "we" and the "us" in the plural.
- Regarding the second person, there are two forms of "you" for the singular and for the plural: "vosotros" and "vosotras" .
- In reference to the third person, we would have to highlight the existence of four different forms for the singular: "he" , "she" , "it" and "you" . For the plural, on the other hand, there are three modalities: "they" , "them" and "you" .
- The personal pronoun is used specifically in cases where you want to make clear who the subject is and also when you want to emphasize who the subject would be.
- In the same way, in a general way, when talking about a group of people, it is usual to use the masculine form of the pronoun to refer to it and only resort to the feminine form when all the members of the group are women.
Personal pronouns can also indicate possession (such as “mine” or “yours” ) or verbal objects ( “me,” “it” ): “Don't worry, Carlos already told me,” “Is that car yours?” , “Leave that notebook that is mine” , “A cousin of yours is a professional soccer player and plays in Austria” , “Let's go to my house to do the natural sciences work and then we have the afternoon free” , “I like your jacket” .
The syntactic function of personal pronouns can vary.
Types of personal pronouns
According to the differences in grammatical person, it is possible to distinguish between three types of personal pronouns:
- Tonic pronoun : Also called independent pronoun , it is usually used as an independent response to a question. Depending on the language, it may or may not be mandatory.
- Object pronoun : These are verbal clitic pronouns ( “He assured me he would clean the room,” “He preferred not to tell me how much it cost.” ).
- Possessive pronoun : These nominal clitic pronouns are used together with terms that can act as the nucleus of a noun phrase that is not determined: "It's your last chance."
Another classification differentiates between stressed personal pronouns and unstressed personal pronouns .
Tonics function as a proposition term, attribute or subject. The unstressed, on the other hand, act as a formant when pronominal verbs are used or as a non-prepositional verbal complement.
It is important to indicate that unstressed personal pronouns must be pronounced linked to the verb, forming an accentual unit with it.