See also
In Modern English, they is a third-person pronoun relating to a grammatical subject.
In Standard Modern English, they has five distinct word forms: [1]
Old English had a single third-person pronoun hē , which had both singular and plural forms, and they wasn't among them. In or about the start of the 13th century, they was imported from a Scandinavian source (Old Norse þeir, Old Danish, Old Swedish þer, þair), in which it was a masculine plural demonstrative pronoun. It comes from Proto-Germanic *thai, nominative plural pronoun, from PIE *to-, demonstrative pronoun. [4] According to The Cambridge History of the English Language : [5]
By Chaucer's time the th- form has been adopted in London for the subject case only, whereas the oblique cases remain in their native form (hem, here< OE heom, heora). At the same period (and indeed before), Scots texts, such as Barbour's Bruce, have the th- form in all cases.
The development in Middle English is shown in the following table. At the final stage, it had reached its modern form.
| I | II | III | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nominative | þei | þei | þei |
| Oblique | hem | hem | hem ~ þem |
| Genitive | her[e] | her[e] ~ þeir | þeir |
Singular they is a use of they as an epicene (gender-neutral) pronoun for a singular referent. [7] [8] In this usage, they follows plural agreement rules (they are, not *they is), but the semantic reference is singular. Unlike plural they, singular they is only used for people. For this reason, it could be considered to have personal gender. Some people refuse to use the epicene pronoun they when referring to individuals on the basis that it is primarily a plural pronoun instead of a singular pronoun. [9] [10] [11] However, the online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary records usage of they "referring to an individual generically or indefinitely", with examples dating to 2008–2009. [12]
In December 2019, Merriam-Webster chose singular they as word of the year. The word was chosen because "English famously lacks a gender-neutral singular pronoun to correspond neatly with singular pronouns like everyone or someone, and as a consequence they has been used for this purpose for over 600 years." [13]
They can appear as a subject, object, determiner or predicative complement. [1] The reflexive form also appears as an adjunct.
Pronouns rarely take dependents, but it is possible for they to have many of the same kind of dependents as other noun phrases.
Plural they's referents can be anything, including persons, as long as it does not include the speaker (which would require we ) or the addressee(s) (which would require you ). Singular they can only refer to individual persons. Until the end of the 20th century, this was limited to those whose gender is unknown (e.g., "Someone's here. I wonder what they want"; "That person over there seems to be waving their hands at us."). [14]
The pronoun they can also be used to refer to an unspecified group of people, as in "In Japan they drive on the left", or "They're putting in a new restaurant across the street." It often refers to the authorities, or to some perceived powerful group, sometimes sinister: "They don't want the public to know the whole truth."
According to the Oxford English Dictionary , the following pronunciations are used:
| Form | Full | Reduced | Recording |
|---|---|---|---|
| they | /ˈðeɪ/ | ||
| them | (UK) /ˈðɛm/ (US) /ˈðɛm/ | (UK) /ð(ə)m/ (US) /ðəm/ | |
| their | (UK) /ˈðɛː/ (US) /ˈðɛr/ | (UK) /ðə/ (US) /ðər/ | |
| theirs | (UK) /ˈðɛːz/ (US) /ˈðɛrz/ | ||
| themselves | /ðɛmˈsɛlvz/ | (UK) /ð(ə)mˈsɛlvz/ (US) /ðəmˈsɛlvz/ | |
| themself | /ðɛmˈsɛlf/ | (UK) /ð(ə)mˈsɛlf/ (US) /ðəmˈsɛlf/ |
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase.
Singular they, along with its inflected or derivative forms, them, their, theirs, and themselves, is a gender-neutral third-person pronoun. It typically occurs with an indeterminate antecedent, in sentences such as:
English grammar is the set of structural rules of the English language. This includes the structure of words, phrases, clauses, sentences, and whole texts.
A third-person pronoun is a pronoun that refers to an entity other than the speaker or listener. Some languages with gender-specific pronouns have them as part of a grammatical gender system, a system of agreement where most or all nouns have a value for this grammatical category. A few languages with gender-specific pronouns, such as English, Afrikaans, Defaka, Khmu, Malayalam, Tamil, and Yazgulyam, lack grammatical gender; in such languages, gender usually adheres to "natural gender", which is often based on biological sex. Other languages, including most Austronesian languages, lack gender distinctions in personal pronouns entirely, as well as any system of grammatical gender.
In Modern English, he is a singular, masculine, third-person pronoun.
In Modern English, we is a plural, first-person pronoun.
In Modern English, it is a singular, neuter, third-person pronoun.
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The English personal pronouns are a subset of English pronouns taking various forms according to number, person, case and grammatical gender. Modern English has very little inflection of nouns or adjectives, to the point where some authors describe it as an analytic language, but the Modern English system of personal pronouns has preserved some of the inflectional complexity of Old English and Middle English.
In linguistics, especially within generative grammar, phi features are the morphological expression of a semantic process in which a word or morpheme varies with the form of another word or phrase in the same sentence. This variation can include person, number, gender, and case, as encoded in pronominal agreement with nouns and pronouns. Several other features are included in the set of phi-features, such as the categorical features ±N (nominal) and ±V (verbal), which can be used to describe lexical categories and case features.
In linguistics, agreement or concord occurs when a word changes form depending on the other words to which it relates. It is an instance of inflection, and usually involves making the value of some grammatical category "agree" between varied words or parts of the sentence.
Personal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person, second person, or third person. Personal pronouns may also take different forms depending on number, grammatical or natural gender, case, and formality. The term "personal" is used here purely to signify the grammatical sense; personal pronouns are not limited to people and can also refer to animals and objects.
One is an English language, gender-neutral, indefinite pronoun that means, roughly, "a person". For purposes of verb agreement it is a third-person singular pronoun, though it sometimes appears with first- or second-person reference. It is sometimes called an impersonal pronoun. It is more or less equivalent to the Scots "a body", the French pronoun on, the German/Scandinavian man, and the Spanish uno. It can take the possessive form one's and the reflexive form oneself, or it can adopt those forms from the generic he with his and himself.
In Modern English, she is a singular, feminine, third-person pronoun.
In Modern English, I is the singular, first-person pronoun.
The English pronouns form a relatively small category of words in Modern English whose primary semantic function is that of a pro-form for a noun phrase. Traditional grammars consider them to be a distinct part of speech, while most modern grammars see them as a subcategory of noun, contrasting with common and proper nouns. Still others see them as a subcategory of determiner. In this article, they are treated as a subtype of the noun category.
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In English, possessive words or phrases exist for nouns and most pronouns, as well as some noun phrases. These can play the roles of determiners or of nouns.
English determiners are words – such as the, a, each, some, which, this, and numerals such as six – that are most commonly used with nouns to specify their referents. The determiners form a closed lexical category in English.