One kind of word that can be used for referring to ‘things’ is the personal pronoun. Here are a few examples: I will be there in a minute You haven’t got much He is against the proposals Please tell them Show me the method In these examples the pronouns could be replaced by noun phrases, so it is evident that they are functioning in a similar way to noun phrases in the construction of the whole sentence. A respect in which personal pronouns differ from nouns is that they inflect for a greater number of case distinctions. I only appears when the pronoun is the subject of the sentence; otherwise the forms that occur are me, my, mine or myself. The choice among these forms is governed by the relation between the pronoun and the rest of the construction in which it is playing a part. We shall not at present investigate these various syntactic relations. Figure 11 gives a table of the personal pronouns in their various forms. Figure 11 The personal pronouns are called personal because they reflect the grammatical category of person: first person reference is reference to the one who is speaking (I, we, etc.; rows 1 and 5 in the table); second person reference is to the one, or ones, who are being addressed (you, etc.; rows 7 and 8 in the table); third person reference is to entities other than the speaker and the addressees, and this includes inanimate objects and abstractions as well as people (he, she, it, they, etc.; rows 2, 3, 4 and 6 of the table, as well as the minister, this tea, Jack, the cheapness of these goods, etc.). Third person reference can be made by means of either a pronoun or a common noun in a noun phrase; first and second person reference are normally only achieved by the use of a pronoun. Third person pronouns, he, she, it, they and
so on, therefore have the important characteristic of normally being used to refer back to something that has already been mentioned. If you want to know who the speaker means by she, you can normally find out by taking note of what female he has just mentioned. This property of back reference is not, of course, normal for first and second person pronouns. To find out who the words I and you refer to, we need only take note of who is speaking and who is being addressed. When the third person pronouns have this back referring function we can regard them as substitutes for noun phrases. In the sentence He is speaking, he may be a substitute for my brother, the minister or whatever other nominal group that refers to a male person has recently been used. (In fact the name ‘pronoun’ might be considered misleading; ‘pro-nounphrase’ would be better.) The substitutability of pronouns for noun phrases gives us another criterion for recognizing noun phrases: an expression that can have a third person pronoun substituted for it is likely to be a noun phrase: He was astonished at the cheapness of the goods He was astonished at it The second sentence shows that the cheapness of the goods is a noun phrase. The same test reveals that the goods is also a noun phrase: He was astonished at the cheapness of them. So we have one noun phrase within another, as shown in Figure 12. (See p. 21 on post-modifiers.)
(Exercises 24 and 25 are on pp. 34–5.)