Rules for English Pronominalization

Abstract

Most contemporary handbooks of English recognize a class of so-called ‘function-words’ with special inflection, called pronouns, together sometimes with a wider class of words which are said to replace pronouns in certain environments and are called perhaps ‘pronominale’; all are often classified as a subset of nouns. More or less attention may be given to the peculiarities of English pronominal inflection, but important regularities among obligatory choices of pronoun are usually avoided, no doubt because all previous discussions of this subject in older texts have had to resort heavily to semantic notions. In fact, the strong implication of most contemporary treatments is that the choice of pronominals is dictated, if at all, purely by the intended meaning of the sentence.