Pronouns
Pronounstake the place of other words in a sentence—they are NOT always nouns; sometimes they are adjectives. Is it important to know that there are reflexive, personal, possessive, interrogative, or demonstrative pronouns in the English language? No, not really.
What’s important is that you know what one is when you see it and how it is being used.
(Q) In the above sentence, three words are in bold. These are all pronouns. What word(s) in the sentence are they all replacing? If you can’t figure it out, read the sentence, but substitute each selection for the bold word until you find the one that makes the most sense.
a) Bologna
b) A Jedi Master
c) A mutated cupcake traced with alien hieroglyphics
d)A pronoun
Consider the following sentences. The first sentence in the pair is written without using pronouns. See if you can determine which sentence fits more closely with the way people speak, and then compare the two sentences.
Circle the words in the second sentence you think might be pronouns.
1)John sped home in John’s new car—the car John’s parents bought for John when John’s parents won the lottery last week.
2)John sped home in his new car—the one his parents bought for him when they won the lottery last week.
Pronouns have antecedents, which is a fancy word for ancestor. A pronoun’s antecedent is the word the pronoun takes the place of.
The “I” pronoun
“I came home late last night. The front door was splintered. I wondered if the burglars were still in the house. I hoped they didn’t eat my pie. That would suck.”
Q) In the above sentence, we can figure out that “I” definitely refers to someone, but in this particular case, there is no apparent antecedent. Who is the antecedent?
Answer:
a) Baseball legend Babe Ruth
b) Legendary writer Mark Twain
c) A Hostess Cupcake
d) The story’s narrator
Generally speaking, avoid using a pronoun when there is no clear antecedent or you risk ambiguity.
Practice!
Underline all of the pronouns in each sentence, and then draw a box around the antecedents. Connect all pronouns and their antecedents with a line.
Keep in mind a sentence can have more than one pronoun referring back to a single word!!
1) The boy in the red hat hit a homerun with his little brother’s bat.
2) Sally was pleased with herself after receiving an A on her report card.
3) Marko always loved corvettes; he wants to buy one someday.
4) Jackie was thrilled when she got the acceptance letter from W.K.U.
5) Mary scared the crap out of her cat when she dropped the book on the floor.
6) The dog wagged its tail when his owner finally got home with the kibble.
7) Heckle and Jeckle were a pair of impish birds; they were always getting into trouble.
8) College professors teach quite differently than their public school counterparts.
9) Baseball legend Babe Ruth hit more than seven-hundred homeruns during his twenty-plus-year career; he played most of which with the New York Yankees.
10) Author Flannery O’Connor captivated readers with hard-edged satire as she poked fun at the human folly found in Southern society in her many short stories.
Writer’s Corner—Pronoun Ambiguity
One has to be careful always to keep the reader in mind when writing. When writers fail to do so, they can create pronoun ambiguity, which means 1) the pronoun may refer back to more than one antecedent depending on how you read the sentence, or 2) the pronoun doesn’t refer to an antecedent at all. YOU might know exactly who the pronoun refers to since YOU are the author; however, a reader, who does not have access to your inner thoughts, doesn’t know. Consider the following sentences:
1)The students picked the easiest assignment because they were terrified of the hard one. That puzzles me.
2)The circus was awesome; they said it would be great.
Q) Discuss possible reasons why the bolded pronouns may be ambiguous.