Identification and Use of Pronouns in Making Sentences, etc.

Back to: English Language Primary 4

 

Welcome to class! 

In today’s class, we will be talking about the identification and use of pronouns in making sentences. Enjoy the class!

Identification and use of pronouns in making sentences.

Pronouns

A pronoun can be used instead of a noun.

1. The dog has a kennel (dog = noun)
2. It has a kennel (It = pronoun)

Some pronouns show ownership or possession.

They are called possessive pronouns e.g. Mine, yours, ours

Here is a list of possessive pronouns:

Possessive pronoun	Example
mine	The book on the floor is mine.
yours	Is this yours?
his	The red bicycle is his.
hers	The tom letter is hers.
ours	All the sheep in the field are ours.
theirs	Our garden is bigger than theirs.

1. Pronouns: reflexive

Pronouns are words that stand instead of nouns. Personal pronouns are used instead of nouns that mean persons or (especially it) animals or things. They can be singular or plural, masculine gender, feminine gender, or neutral gender. A pronoun may be the subject or the object. The subjective form of many pronouns is different from their objective form.

In this, pronouns are not like nouns.

Yes, there are three or four more kinds. Let’s look at these first, the –self, -selves kind.

These pronouns always end in -self (or -selves for the plural): myself, yourself, himself, herself, itself, oneself, ourselves, yourselves, themselves.

The -self pronouns usually stand for the same person or thing as the subject of the sentence. Let us sec some of them at work.

1. I saw myself in the mirror.
2. Be careful or you will hurt yourself.
3. Richard helped himself to the cakes.
4. Mary dressed herself
5. One must be allowed to please oneself.
6. The kitten can now feed itself.
7. We taught ourselves to swim.
8. The boys hurt themselves getting over the wall.

There is, of course, a difference in meaning between these two sentences:

• Tom hit him.
• Tom hit himself.

The action doesn’t go from one person or thing to another. It comes back again

• like the reflection in a mirror
• to the doer of the action.

These -self pronouns are called reflexive pronouns.

Here are the -self pronouns arranged in a table.

	Singular	Plural
1st person	myself	ourselves
2nd person	yourself himself	yourselves
3rd person	herself itself oneself	themselves

 

2. Pronouns: possessive, interrogative and demonstrative

• Possessive pronouns:

Remember that we had adjectives that showed possession: my book, your cat, his bicycle, her car, our house, their garden.

But in the following sentences, there are some other words that show possession.

1. That seat isn’t yours; it’s
2. Lend me your bicycle; hers is no good.
3. He’s wearing a hat that isn’t
4. That cat is
5. We spent the day with the Browns. Theirs was the best party I have been to.

The words yours, mine, ours, etc., don’t qualify nouns. They show possession, and here they are standing instead of nouns; yours means, in that sentence, ‘your seat’, hers means ‘her bicycle’. They are possessive pronouns.

You will quite often find the possessive pronouns used with of, like this:

1. He is a friend of
2. Not a friend of me as you might expect.

Here are some examples:

1. That dog of yours has been fighting again. ‘
2. There’s John and that friend of his, going to play tennis.

Here is a (able, so thaï you can compare the possessive pronouns and the possessive adjectives.

Possessive adjectives	Possessive pronouns
1.    This is my book. 2.    This is your book. 3.    This is his book. 4.    This is her book. 5.    This is our book. 6.    This is their book.	This book is mine. This book is yours. This book is his. This book is hers. This book is ours. This book is theirs.

Pronouns that show possession are possessive pronouns.

• Interrogative pronouns:

There are some pronouns that we use when we ask questions. For example,

1. Who are you?
2. What have you done today?
3. Which of these books do you want?

Pronouns that are used to ask questions are interrogative pronouns.

• Demonstrative pronouns:

Here are four pronouns whose work is to point out things.

1. This is a book.
2. These are my books.
3. That is a star.
4. Those are stars.

Pronouns that ‘point out’ are called demonstrative pronouns.

• Subjective pronouns:

The personal pronouns I, you, we, he, she, it, and they are known as subjective pronouns because they act as the subjects of verbs:

1. She saw Catherine.
2. We drove Nick home.
3. I waved at her.

• Objective pronouns:

The personal pronouns me, you, us, him, her, it, and them are called objective pronouns because they act as the objects of verbs and prepositions:

1. Catherine saw her.
2. Nick drove us home.
3. She waved at me.

Here’s a table setting out the different forms:

	SINGULAR		PLURAL
	subjective	objective	subjective	objective
first person	I	me	we	us
second person	you	you	you	you
third person	he/she/it/they	him/her/it/them	they	them

Notice that the personal pronouns you and it stay the same, whether they are being used in the subjective or objective roles.

 

Aural discrimination in vowels and consonants – recognition and contrast of the sounds in words.

Vowels and consonants are sounds, not letters. Depending on your accent and how thinly you slice them, there are about 20 vowels and 24 consonants.

The difference between vowels and consonants

A vowel is a speech sound made with your mouth fairly open, the nucleus of a spoken syllable.

A consonant is a sound made with your mouth fairly closed.

Consonants require more precise articulation than vowels. Most syllables contain a vowel, though vowel-like consonants can occasionally be syllables. And to complicate matters, many English vowels are technically two or three vowels joined together.

Consonant chart, which you might like to refer to in what follows:

Consonants that are like vowels – approximants

The last four consonant sounds on the above list – “y”, “w”, “r”, “l” – are produced with less mouth constriction than other consonants, and in linguistics are called “approximants”.

Approximants occupy a kind of linguistic grey area between vowels and consonants, in fact, “w” and “y” are also known as semivowels.

There’s very little difference between the consonant sound “y” and the vowel sound “ee” as in “see/sea/me”, and between the consonant sound “w” and the vowel sound “ooh” as in “moon/rule/grew”.

These sounds are classified as consonants because they generally behave like consonants, that is, they’re (in) syllable onsets, not syllable nuclei.

Syllabic consonants

In many English dialects, the sound “l” can be a syllable all by itself in words like “bottle” and “middle”. This is also true of the sound “n” in words like “button” and “hidden”.

In these words, the tongue has just said “t” or “d”, so it’s already in the right place to go straight into the sound “l” or “n”, without saying a vowel first. However, we still write a “vowel letter” in this syllable (le, on, en) and we say a vowel sound in other words with similar final spellings, like “giggle” and “dabble”, “ribbon” and “beckon”, “happen”.

The sound “m” can also act as a syllable in words like “rhythm” and “algorithm”, again because the sounds “th” and “m” are physically very close together. In this case, we don’t write a “vowel letter” in the last syllable, but we do say a vowel sound in the last syllable of most words spelt like this, like “autism” and “criticism”.

 

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