Gruesday--Personal Pronouns

Hi everyone, I hope you all had a marvelous Christmas. I know I did. Here in North Texas we had a White Christmas, which is something I’ve never experienced before, so it was definitely nice and my son was very excited about it. But now that Christmas is over it’s time to get back to that Gruesome Grammar! Today (instead of Gruesday) I am having Grrrsday…? Lol… maybe I will just stick with Gruesday. Next week will go back to normal schedule and Gruesday will go back to it's regular day of the week--Tuesday.

This week I am exploring personal pronouns.

Personal Pronouns represent specific people or things . How they are used depends on:

-number-singular(I) or plural(we)

-person- 1^st person (I), 2^nd person (you), 3^rd person (he)

-gender- female(she), male(he), neutral(we)

-case-object(us), subject(we)

As we already know from last week’s post--pronouns take the place of a noun and sometimes another pronoun.

I found a chart similar to this one online and recreated since I found it to be very helpful.

number	person	gender	Personal pronouns
			subject	object
singular	1st	male/female	I	me
	2nd	male/female	you	you
	3rd	male	he	him
		female	she	her
		neutral	it	it
plural	1st	Male/female	we	us
	2nd	Male/female	you	you
	3rd	Male/female/neutral	they	them

Here are some examples of how these personal pronouns are used in a sentence: (The first sentence shows subject pronoun and second, object pronoun)

-I like the movie.

-He told me he loves me.

-Do you like Finding Nemo?

-I don’t understand you.

-He looked at the dog.

-He looked at him.

-What is she doing?

-The cat was her animal.

-It doesn't work.

-Where is it?

-Do you need four eggs or five?

-Did Allie and AJ buy you a Christmas present?

-They watched a movie.

-Candy and Prince went home with them.

I hope this post was helpful. Check back this coming Tuesday for a look at Possessive Pronouns. :-)

Gruesday--Intro to the Pesky Pronoun

Welcome to week three of Gruesome Grammar Tuesday!

In this week’s Gruesday post I am going to be discussing the pronoun. In fact I am going to split this post up, because—believe or not—the pronoun is more complicated and pesky than even those nosy nouns. So this week I am just going to talk about the basic definitions of the pronoun and describe how it is used in most instances.

What is a pronoun?

-          Pronouns are used in place of nouns (or sometimes another pronoun) to avoid repetition and make sentences easier to understand.

o   Ex.—The mother told the mother’s daughter that the mother was going to make spaghetti for the mother’s daughter for dinner. –There are no pronouns in the sentence and it makes the sentence very hard to follow.

Here is the same sentence using pronouns.—The mother told her daughter that she was going to make spaghetti for her for dinner.

-          A pronoun may also stand in the place of an understood noun.

o   Ex. If a person has been named before-hand, then the sentence—Mary where did you put the fishing pole?—Can just be cut down to—Where did you put the fishing pole?

-          A pronoun can also stand in as an indefinite it.

o   Ex. It is way too cold.—it is the indefinite and is understood to mean the temperature (of something).

According to The Chicago Manual of Style 16^th edition, there are six classes of pronouns.

1.       personal

2.       demonstrative

3.       interrogative

4.       relative

5.       indefinite

6.       adjective

Next week will be all about personal pronouns. Don't forget to come back and see how pesky pronouns can get!

This post would not have been possible without:

The Chicago Manual of Style 16th edition

and

All About Pronouns