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Personal Pronouns

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Grammar > Parts of Speech > Pronouns

Personal Pronouns are a subset of pronouns which stand in for people, places, things and ideas.

This is a full table of personal pronouns:

Subject Object Reflexive Possessive
singular I me myself mine
singular you you yourself yours
singular masculine he him himself his
singular feminine she her herself hers
singular neutral it it itself its
singular ngs* they them themself their
singular ngs* one one oneself one's
plural we us ourselves ours
plural you you yourselves yours
plural they them themselves theirs
*ngs = non-gender specific; this is an increasingly common form of pronoun to replace gender-specific him/her. Read here for more.


Contents

Personal Pronouns as Subjects

We can replace the subject of a sentence with a personal pronoun:

Alice looked at the cat.
She looked at the cat.


Personal Pronouns as Objects

We can replace the object of a sentence with a personal pronoun:

Alice looked at the cat.
Alice looked at it.


Personal Pronouns as Reflexives

We can replace the reflexive noun of a sentence with a personal pronoun:

Alice washed Alice.
Alice washed herself.


Personal Pronouns as Possessives

We can replace the possessive determiner and its noun with a personal pronoun:

I paid for my ice cream and John paid for John's ice cream.
I paid for my ice cream and John paid for his.


Specific Personal Pronouns

One

We can use one as a pronoun to replace anybody and we use it to talk about people in general but it is not used very much these days and is very formal:

One must accept that one has limitations.
To truly know oneself requires great commitment.
One must obey one's superiors.

Note: The possessive takes an apostrophe.

You

We use the pronoun you in two ways:

- we can use you to refer to the person we are talking to:

Do you want to come with me?
Where did you go last night?

We can also use you to talk about people in general:

You can't get a good job without qualifications.
What you need to do is increase public spending to reduce inflation.

When we are talking about people in general, we can also use one instead of you. This is more formal and less common in everyday speech:

One can't get a good job without qualifications.
What one needs is a change in leadership.
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