Types of Pronouns

Personal Pronouns

Personal pronouns are used for a specific object or person and change their form to indicate a gender, number, case, or person speaking.

Reflexive and Intensive Pronouns

The reflexive pronoun will end in -self or -selves and is used in reference to another pronoun that has been used in an earlier part of the same sentence. Reflexive pronouns are also used when a person or thing acts on itself.

Reflexive pronoun list: myself, yourself, himself, herself, itself, ourselves, yourselves, themselves.

Examples:

• Rosa was going to take it to the shop but ended up fixing it herself one afternoon.

Here, we can see that herself is being used to refer to ‘Rosa’ again at the end of the sentence.

• He prefers to be by himself after a game.

Here, himself is used to refer to ‘him’.

• Apart from ordering in, they cooked a few snack themselves.

Here themselves is used to show that ‘they’ cooked something.

• The horse hurt itself while trying to escape.

Since itself is a gender neutral pronoun, it is used to show the nouns that have no definite gender (ex. material things or ideas, or whose gender is unknown)

These same words are also called Intensive Pronouns, which are used to lay emphasis on the pronoun that comes before them in the sentence.

• They themselves knew that the prank was in bad taste.

Here, the pronoun themselves is used to emphasize ‘they’.

• Avoid reporting things that you yourself haven’t witnessed.

Here yourself is used to emphasize the pronoun ‘you’.

Indefinite Pronouns

The indefinite pronoun is used for non-specific beings, objects, or places, or is to show unspecified objects or people, whether plural or in singular. They are used to indicate the entire noun, some of the noun, or none of the noun.

Indefinite Pronoun List: another, anybody/ anyone, anything, each, either, enough, everybody/ everyone, everything,…

Reciprocal Pronouns

The reciprocal pronoun is used to show an action or feeling which is reciprocated. There are just two Reciprocal Pronouns: "Each other" and "One another". They are used when two or more nouns are doing or being the same to one another. Both of these pronouns are plural in nature as they can only be used in situations where there is more than one noun.

Examples:

• Jamie and Jack always sit beside each other in break.

Here, the reciprocation is between the children as they both sit together.

• They haven’t seen one another since last year.

Here, neither of the two parties has seen each other in some time.

• The trees seem to reach towards each other in a strong wind.

Here, we have an unspecified amount of trees bending towards the others in a strong wind.