Talk:Pronoun

Error in Notes, "prenominal pronouns"
There is an error in the Notes at the bottom: "^ Not to be confused with prenominal, which means "before the noun". English adjectives are prenominal – the big house — and French adjectives are postnominal — la maison grande." In fact, a limited number of pronouns in French go in front of nouns, and that includes grand/grande. Some French pronouns may go before or after depending on type of meaning, and grand/grande is in this class! https://www.thoughtco.com/introduction-to-french-adjectives-1368789 So a different example of a postnominal pronoun is required in this section. 66.241.130.86 (talk) 19:56, 13 December 2017 (UTC)


 * ✅ – 82.126.185.210 (talk) 09:57, 14 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Replay83.120.231.247 83.120.231.247 (talk) 08:20, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

Pronoun scope in different languages
Different languages have different scope for what "pronoun" means, ranging from the narrow English definition of substituting for a noun to almost as broad as pro-form. For example, Czech pronouns also include many words that are classified as determiners in English. These pronouns can substitute for an adjective. Slovak language had the same pronoun scope as Czech for some time, but its definition of pronouns was later expanded to include words that substitute for adverbs and numerals, which makes Slovak pronouns closer (but not identical) to English pro-forms. As far as I can tell, Polish pronouns are also closer to pro-form than to English pronouns. This variety in pronoun scope could be mentioned at the beginning of the article, but I hesitate to edit, because I am not a linguist. Anyone in support or against? Comments? — Robert Važan (talk) 11:53, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

Actually, as I am studying this, I notice that standard Czech has adverbial and numeral pronouns in addition to substantive and adjective ones, just like Slovak. Wiktionaries (both CS and EN) got it wrong. I am now wondering whether there are only two ways to define the pronoun, the narrow English definition and what appears to be a broad Slavic definition (shared by Polish, Czech, and Slovak at least), or whether there are more variations in scope. — Robert Važan (talk) 14:48, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

This article is problematic; while it's good that it acknowledges the heavy focus on English, there should be information about pronouns crosslinguistically, illustrated with data from both English and other languages. There could be a new page particularly about English pronouns. It's problematic to conflate the grammatical category with pronominal features of English, however. Claire (talk) 20:58, 28 May 2020 (UTC)

Thing is a noun
I'm going to edit the example to bold face "thing" in "Who would say such a thing?" as it is a noun. TFJamMan (talk) 07:41, 15 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Thing is not a pronoun though, and this article is about pronouns and not nouns, so I am reverting your edit. Zacharycmango (talk) 22:28, 25 July 2021 (UTC)

Wrong statement regarding pronoun
A pronoun can consist of two words. E.g., "this one". Jdjlpwfj (talk) 09:03, 19 September 2021 (UTC)

Types of pronoun
In detail 2401:4900:3E2C:31DC:2CD2:27FF:FE6D:4B90 (talk) 14:45, 14 October 2022 (UTC)