o a ‘part of speech’
o very different from other lexical-grammatical classes of words:
(1) semantically:
o have no denotational meaning, do not name objects of reality
o have very general and unspecified semantics of indication (= deixis) which is only actualised in context
o Semantic groups of Pronous:
- Personal ProN
- Demonstrative ProN
- Reflexive ProN
- Reciprocal ProN
- Possessive ProN
- Indefinite ProN
- Relative ProN
- Interrogative ProN
(2) morphologically:
o Only a few pronouns are variable while most are not:
o Personal Pronouns have the morphological Category of Case which is different from the Category of Case of the Noun:
- the Common – Object – Genitive case forms with incomplete paradigms
o Demonstrative and Personal Pronouns have the morphological Category of Number
(3) syntactically:
o have no syntactic functions of their own; substitute for words of other classes (= are used in their functions) → Syntactic groups of ProN:
- Noun-Pronouns (= Substantivized ProN),
- Adjective-Pronouns (= Adjectivized ProN)
o With some pronouns there is no substitution:
- I, you, they, ‘dummy’ it
→ an extremely heterogeneous class, but it has two defining characteristics which unite the class of pronouns and make it different from all the other word classes:
- no lexical meaning but semantics of indication
- no syntactic roles of their own but the function of substitution