Pronouns
Male: OK, you got your verbs, you got your nouns, and you got your pronouns. Then there are your 1)modifiers like your adjectives, adverbs and prepositions.
Female: This half-hour, we’ll discuss pronouns and the many interesting ways people have of messing with them. With pronouns, there are two basic issues that
have to be addressed. Number one concerns which pronouns are appropriate to use in place of the nouns they replace. As it was with verbs, this is an issue of aGREement.
Male: The other aspect of pronouns that we’ll examine is the 2)deceptive way many of them have of sounding plural when they’re really singular and occasionally 3)vice versa.
Female: So let’s start by looking at the first issue: aGREement with the 4)antecedent.
Male: Umm...what’s the antecedent?
Female: Good question. It means the word that came before. In this case, it’s the word for which the pronoun substitutes. For example, in the sentence, ＂Tony wants a cigar and he is going to go out and find one＂, the pronoun is ＂he＂ and its antecedent, the word it represents, is ＂Tony＂.
Male: There are three basic rules to remember when working with antecedents. Rule number one: the pronoun must aGREe with the antecedent’s 5)gender.
Female: Women get ＂she＂ or ＂her＂ while men are usually referred to as ＂he＂ or ＂him＂.
Male: Rule number two: the pronoun must aGREe with the antecedent’s person.
Female: That is to say, in the first person, use ＂I＂, ＂me＂ or ＂we＂. In the second person, use ＂you＂. And in the third person, use ＂he＂, ＂she＂, ＂they＂ etc.
Male: Rule number three: the pronoun must aGREe with its antecedent’s number.
Female: Right. If you’re dealing with more than one person or thing, use a plural pronoun such as they. Singular gets something like it, he or she.
Male: Here’s an example: Although the average rock musician owns many pieces of sophisticated, expensive equipment, they still don’t play with the 6)virtuosity of most classical players.
Female: The problem is hard to hear because the pronoun is so far away from its antecedent. Ask yourself, ＂Who doesn’t play with the virtuosity of most classical players?＂
Male: The average rock musician. Ah ha, I see. That’s a singular noun.
Female: Right, but in your sentence you’ve put a lot of plural nouns that aren’t the antecedent before the pronoun. So by the time you got there, you forgot to use the singular pronoun ＂she＂.
Male: She?
Female: Joan Jet, Chrissy Heine, Madonna, Pat Benetar.
Male: Pat Benetar? Is there no depth to which you will not sink?
Female: Careful now. Pat Benetar was the hardest rocking woman in show business for quite a while.
Male: You are a desperate woman. Anyway the pronoun, whether male or female, must remain singular because the antecedent ＂the average rock musician＂ is singular.
Female: Furthermore, because the antecedent is in the third person, that is, it’s neither an ＂I＂ or a ＂you＂ but a ＂he＂ or a ＂she＂ that we’re talking about, it would be wrong to use either the first or second person pronoun in this sentence.
Male: And just as we solved the problem in the verb section, we can fix this error by simply removing all the information that sits between the words that must aGREe, and jam them right up against one another.
Female: When there’s no distance between them, there’s no difficulty in hearing whether they aGREe. Listen. ＂Although the average rock musician owns...they still don’t play.＂
Male: Now you can clearly tell that, ＂that’s no good. They clearly needs to be a ‘he’ or ‘she’.＂
Female: Some more examples of some common mistakes: ＂Steve and Robert went to the store and he bought some 7)ginseng.＂ The problem? As we learned in the section on verbs, the conjunction ＂and＂ makes two singular subjects plural. The plural pronoun in the third person is ＂they＂.
Male: But what if only one of them bought the ginseng? Are you saying that we’re stuck using a plural pronoun anyway?
Female: Not at all. But if you want to make it clear that only one of them actually bought the ginseng, then you have to say just that one of them did. And furthermore, if you need to 8)clarify which one, then you simply have to say which one: Steve or Robert.
Male: Once again, these three rules are the basic ones. The pronouns must aGREe with the words they replace in terms of number, gender and person.
Female: There are some other twists to pronouns, however, and these are where most people start making more mistakes. We know that the subject of a verb is a thing that’s doing the action that the verb expresses.
Male: The object of a verb, however, is the thing which is having the action done to it. For example, in the sentence, ＂Christie walked the runway,＂ ‘Christie’ is the subject. She’s doing the walking. While the runway is the object of that action. The runway is receiving the walking. And what a walk it is!
Female: She is 9)fierce.
Male: Under rated if you can believe that. This is important because pronouns 10)differ according to whether they are representing the subject or the object of a sentence.
Female: Right. The pronoun that represents Christie, the subject is she. She walks the runway. If however, she became the object, then we’d have to use the object pronoun ＂her＂.
