Lesson 2: The Direct Object
Personal Pronouns
pro·noun a word that is used instead of a noun or a noun phrase —Cambridge Dictionary
A pronoun replaces a noun, “in order to avoid repetition.”¹ Can you imagine writing without pronouns? Let’s see what the iconic first two lines of C.S. Lewis’ The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” sounds like when we take out the pronouns...
There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and Eustace Clarence Scrubb almost deserved the name. Eustace Clarence Scrubb's parents called Eustace Clarence Scrubb Eustace Clarence and Eustace Clarence Scrubb's schoolmasters called Eustace Clarence Scrubb Scrubb. The narrator can’t tell the reader how Eustace Clarence Scrubb's friends spoke to Eustace Clarence Scrubb, for Eustace Clarence Scrubb had none.
O how a witty, well-known opening to a great story becomes awkward and difficult to understand without the help of pronouns!
There are all kinds of pronouns in English. The first that we will look at are the personal pronouns. Personal pronouns are words like “you,” “I,” and “they.”
Personal Pronoun Attributes
As we have already learned, nouns have specificity (common or proper) and number (singular or plural). We don’t generally talk about specificity with pronouns (though you could argue that “I” is technically a “proper pronoun”), but pronouns do have number. They also have a person (like verbs) and gender—something that we haven’t encountered yet.
Gender
Gender asks the question if the word specifies male or female. “He” is masculine, and tells us that the person being referenced is a male. “She” is feminine and tells us that the person referenced is a girl. “It” is neuter, indicating that the object being referenced isn’t male or female.
English, as compared to other languages, makes extremely little use of gender. In many languages, parts of speech like nouns, verbs, adverbs, and adjectives all have gender (and number and person, for that matter), making individual words very specific.
Personal Pronoun Cases
Don't Panic! This next section is packed full of detailed information. While this information is important for you to understand, you do not need to memorize the different cases of personal pronouns. As we parse, we will label pronouns according to what they are doing in a particular sentence, not according to their chart definition.
When we learned about nouns in the first lesson, we mentioned cases, a category not used greatly in English, but super important if you decide to learn Greek. The case we have looked at the most thus far is the vocative, referring to a “noun of direct address.” We also mentioned the nominative case in reference to subject nouns, and now we will expand on that (and some other cases).
Nominative = Subject
The nominative pronouns are I, you, he, she, it, we, and they, as seen in the chart above.
When a noun (or pronoun) is the subject of a sentence, it is in the nominative case.
“I love cookies!”
In this sentence, the subject is the nominative personal pronoun “I.” What if I substituted the nominative 1st person singular pronoun for the objective (which you will learn next) 1st person singular pronoun “me?”
“Me love cookies!”
Well now we sound like the Cookie Monster, and as charming as that is, it’s clearly not correct grammar. Subjects of sentences must be in the nominative case, whether nouns or pronouns.
Objective = Object
The objective case of personal pronouns are me, you, him, her, it, us, and them, and the objective case is for objects. Consider the following sentence:
“I gave him a cookie.”
Here, the nominative pronoun “I” is in the subject spot and the objective pronoun “him” is being used to reference the object of the verb “gave.” (We will learn more about objects later.)
For those interested in Koine Greek, note that Objective is not a Greek case. What we call the objective case encompasses the Greek dative and accusative cases.
Possessive = Ownership
The possessive case for personal pronouns consists of mine, yours, his, hers, ours, and theirs. Most often, this type of pronoun will come after the word “is” and form a sentence pattern that we will learn more about in lesson 3. For example:
“The cookie is hers.”
There is another type of possessive pronoun—the possessive pronoun adjective (e.g. my hat, your brother). We will learn all about this type of pronoun when we discuss genitives in lesson 4.
Reflexive reflects back on itself
In grammar, reflexive means something one does to oneself. While, in other languages, verbs themselves might have a reflexive tense, English always indicates a reflexive action by adding a reflexive pronoun after the subject or verb:
“…verbs themselves might have a reflexive tense…”
“Cookie Monster gave himself a cookie.”
“The grammar students gave themselves head massages and poured themselves more coffee before proceeding to the next step in the lesson.”
That’s it! Let’s now take a look at all the personal pronouns in a single chart. (Again, don’t worry about memorizing this; just look through it and ensure everything makes sense to you.)