Delahunty and Garvey
h. Because some person wanted to sell it, Jonathan repaired that per-
son’s bike
i. Jonathan repaired some person’s bike.That is, what a pronoun refers to is not always determined by another noun
phrase in its sentence. Rather, what a pronoun refers to may be determined by
the situational context in which the language is used, as is typically the case in
spoken interaction.
We’d like you to notice now that pronouns are typically shorter and
communicate far less information than their antecedents. For example,
their in (2) provides only the information that more than one entity is
being referred to (along with the grammatical information that their is in
the genitive case), clearly far less information than its antecedent, All of the
members of the class, provides. Using pronouns instead of full noun phrases
avoids repetition and reduces the production demands on the speaker or
writer and processing demands on hearers or readers.
However, because pronouns provide so little information, hearers/readers
expect that speakers/writers will use them only when it is easy to determine
what they refer to. If a pronoun’s referent is not easily or unambiguously de-
termined, hearers/readers may quickly give up trying to interpret the piece
of discourse in which it occurs. In face-to-face communication, the hearer
can simply ask the speaker to clarify an unclear reference. But in written
communication, this is typically not possible. Because confusion in spoken
language can be fairly readily clarified, it tends to have more pronouns than
written language. Beginning writers (and sometimes even more advanced
ones) often use pronoun patterns typical of spoken language and so must
be taught to ensure that the antecedents/referents of their pronouns will be
clear to a reader who cannot ask for clarification.
In English, pronouns and their antecedents must have the same person,
number, and gender; that is, pronouns must agree with their antecedents on
these grammatical categories. All of the sentences in (1) illustrate agreement.
Jonathan and Jeremy are each third person, singular, and masculine, and thus
require the pronouns he, his, or him.
Exercise
Evaluate the traditional definition of “pronoun.”