Delahunty and Garvey
person case singular plural
First Nominative I we
Objective me us
Genitive my our
mine ours
Second Nominative you you
Objective you you
Genitive your your
yours yours
gender
singular plural
Masculine Feminine Neuter
Third Nominative he she it they
Objective him her it them
Genitive his her its their
his hers its theirs
table 1: person, number, gender, and case of personal
pronouns
As Table 1 indicates, the personal pronouns represent the grammatical
categories of person, number, case, and gender. Number (in modern Eng-
lish) simply distinguishes singular (one) from plural (more than one). The
pronoun forms I, you, he/she/it represent distinctions within the person cat-
egory. Person differentiates speakers and those associated with them (first
person: I, we) from addressees (second person: you), and from entities that
are neither speaker nor addressee (third person: she, he, it, they).
The many different forms of the modern English personal pronoun sys-
tem hint at the morphological complexity of the language a millennium
ago. For instance, Old English had pronouns that referred specifically to
two people (called “dual” pronouns), thereby creating a three-way number
distinction. (We still have the word both to refer to two entities and either/
neither to refer to a choice between two entities.)
Standard English is unusual among languages in that it makes no distinc-
tion in the personal pronouns between second person singular and plural—
you does for both. Many non-standard dialects of English do differentiate
singular and plural, e.g., by adding either the ordinary nominal plural end-
ing {-s} (youse) or by adding {all} (you-all or y’all).