Similar to the personal pronouns are the reflexive and reciprocal pronouns.  The reflexive pronouns all agree in person and number with their referents, like the personal pronouns, but they do not have varying forms that agree with different cases.  The reflexive pronouns can only act as objects.  The reciprocal pronouns are even more limited than the reflexive pronouns; they can only substitute for 3rd person plural referents and act as objects.  Another set of pronouns that substitute for known referents is the relative pronouns.  These pronouns will be better discussed as parts of relative clauses rather than as parts of a simple sentence since that complex sentence type is the only situation they appear in.

All the pronouns discussed so far act as substitute for known referents, but as nouns can be indefinite, pronouns must also include a set of indefinites to act as substitutes for these indefinite nouns.  The indefinite pronouns agree with their referents in animacy, whether the referent is human or nonhuman, and in level of definiteness.  The interrogative pronouns are the words that ask for the information to fill in the grammatical roles typically played by nouns.

Activity 9.5: Quantifiers, Determiners, or Pronouns?

Select the word from the list with the same meaning as one of the noun phrases below.  Next try to use it as a substitute for the noun phrase.

Click on the entire noun phrase to change the color to red, then drag a word from the top list to the appropriate box under the phrase.

How would you describe what really seems to be happening in these sentences? Fill in the text box below with your answer, then click on the "Usual Answer" button.

Ellipted or Reduced Noun Phrases as Pronouns

Most of us learned that the words some, many, and so on can be either adjectives or pronouns, but this pedagogical description is a simplification.  We have already seen that numbers and indefinite quantifiers can be viewed as a separate category from adjectives.  Now we see that these words are not true pronouns, either.  What really seems to be happening is gapping, or the practice of deleting some information that can readily be understood from context.  The result is a reduced form of the original noun phrase, not a substitution of the original noun phrase with a wholly different word.  So these words do not act as true pronouns do.

The description here also represents a pedagogical perspective, and theoretical grammar will analyze them in a different way: as postdeterminers.  However, by allowing them to sit as indefinite quantifiers, a subcategory of quantifiers, we can explain why they do not take the same forms as adjectives (because they aren’t adjectives), and by viewing them as often showing up in noun phrases with gapping (in partitive constructions and in these pronominal constructions), we bring greater consistency to the structure of noun phrases and allow for fewer exceptions and fewer rules to learn.

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