A Skeletal Introduction to English Grammar- Pronouns are words like I, you, he, she, it, they, and their relatives
me, your, him, her, its, them, and the like. Substitute an appropriate
pronoun for the italicized phrases in the clauses below. For example,
James Joyce wrote Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake > He wrote them.
a. Hemingway admired Faulkner.
b. Navratilova beat Evert.
c. The women outnumber the men.
Your response to the last exercise should have been:
He admired him.
She beat her.
They outnumber them.
We want you to notice that you chose different pronoun forms to replace
subject and object phrases. By form we mean the observable grammatical
characteristics of expressions, such as their pronunciation (e.g., compáct,
cómpact), what endings they have (e.g., -ize on verbs such as realize), what
endings they may add (e.g., -s indicating plural on nouns), where they ap-
pear in sentences (e.g., him occurs as an object), and what kinds of expres-
sions can substitute for them (e.g., pronouns for noun phrases, do (so) for
predicates).
Clauses may contain one or more modifiers, also called adverbials or
adjuncts, which may take several different grammatical forms and which
may occur in several different positions:
Proceed cautiously/with caution. [Adverbial at end]
Linguists write slowly. [Adverbial at end]
Unfortunately, grammarians frequently disagree. [Adverbial at beginning
and in middle]
One can easily find biographies of all the presidents. [Adverbial in middle]
The papers have been carefully selected and edited/with taste. [Adverbial
in middle and at end]
[In the nineteen twenties,] [at the age of fourteen,] Seamus Murphy began
his apprenticeship. [Adverbials at beginning]
Exercise
- Put brackets around each entire modifier in each of the following