Are pronouns nouns?

Question

In the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Huddleston & Pullum 2002) and many other grammars, the English pronouns are viewed as a subcategory of the English nouns. In other grammars, such as the Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (Quirk et al. 1985) pronouns are considered a separate category of word, so that we have nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs so on and so forth. What are the arguments for including and excluding English pronouns from the English noun category?

Answer 1

My answer complements this and a previous discussion of the issue

Pronouns: a word class or a subclass of nouns?

by quoting extensively from Aarts' analysis in Modern English Grammar on pages 44-46 under the heading Pronouns (Oxford University Press, 2011).

Pronouns belong to the class of nouns because they can head noun phrases that function as Subject, Direct Object, and Indirect Object, Complement of a preposition and Predicative Complement.

Aarts goes on to note:

In some grammars pronouns are regarded as a separate word class. There are a number of reasons for this. Among them are the following:

• Pronouns show a distinction between nominative, accusative and genitive case, while common nouns do not.

• Pronouns show a distinction for person (first person, 2nd person, etc.) and gender (he/she, him/her, etc.) but common nouns do not.

• Pronouns do not have inflectional plurals in Standard English (cf. *yous, *hes, etc.), although they do have singular vs plural person distinctions (e.g. I vs we). ...

• Pronouns are much more limited than common nouns in their potential for taking dependents. For example, while we can have determinatives and adjectives in front of common nouns, they cannot generally determine and modify pronouns. Thus we cannot say *The he left the meeting or *Intelligent you did well in the exams. ... Nouns can be followed by prepositional phrases as in my cancellation of the reservation; pronouns generally cannot.

• Noun phrases with common nouns as Head can have independent reference, while pronouns rely on the linguistic or extra-linguistic context for their reference. Thus, if I say I met the boss this morning the NP the boss refers to a mutually identifiable individual. ... If I say Katie married Harry because she loves him then the most likely reading of this utterance is for she to refer to Katie and for him to refer to Harry.

Despite these observations we take the fact that pronouns can act as the Heads of phrases that can function as Subject, Direct Object, Predicative Complement, and so on, as a sufficiently weighty reason for regarding them as nouns.

I think Aarts makes a convincing enough case for pronouns to be regarded as a sub-class of noun rather than a word class in their own right. But I do not expect that this modern analysis will have much impact on pedagogic grammars (as opposed to Aarts' descriptive grammar) or teaching materials.

Answer 2

From The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CGEL), ch. 5, § 1, p. 327:

Traditionally pronouns are regarded as a separate part of speech, but there are strong grounds for treating them as a subcategory of noun. They differ inflectionally from prototypical nouns and permit a narrower range of dependents, but they qualify as nouns by virtue of heading phrases which occur in the same functions as phrases headed by nouns in the traditional sense, i.e. common and proper nouns. This functional likeness between common nouns, proper nouns, and pronouns is illustrated for the three main clause-structure complement functions in:

        COMMON/PROPER NOUN                      PRONOUN
  i. a. [The boss] / [Liz] was late.         b. [She] was late.                 [subject]
 ii. a. I'll tell [the boss] / [Liz].        b. I'll tell [her].                 [object]
iii. a. It was [the boss] / [Liz] who left.  b. It was [she/her] who left.  [predicative]

So, in CGEL's view, the arguments for excluding pronouns from the category of nouns are:

• pronouns "differ inflectionally from prototypical nouns"
• pronouns "permit a narrower range of dependents" than prototypical nouns

and the argument for including them is:

• phrases headed by pronouns "occur in the same functions as phrases headed by nouns in the traditional sense"

(I guess we could summarize this by saying that on the local/small scale, pronouns behave differently from common and proper nouns, while on a larger scale, pronoun-headed phrases behave the same as common– and proper-noun headed phrases.)

I'm sure that these are not the only arguments to be made in each direction.

Answer 3

As early as 1967, the National Counsel of Teachers of English (NCTE) made an effort to get English teachers on board with the logical arguments for considering a pronoun a type of noun. In "Ideas for Teaching English" on page 338, it states:

"Teach types of nouns: common, proper, pronoun."

Sadly, this obviously has not caught on over the last 50 years.

A related point is the ubiquitous yet illogical classification of possessive determining adjectives as pronouns in typical English grammar books. Again, in 1967 in "Ideas for Teaching English" it states:

"Teach determiners (examples: the, a, this, his, several, one, etc.)"

The logical classifications (pronouns are a kind of noun, and possessive determiners ARE NOT pronouns) are clearly more simple and therefore easier to understand. The basic grammar of sentence structure actually makes sense when all the pieces fit together nicely!

Why do we have to continue fighting this fight?

Answer 4

My experience teaching English to 12-14 year olds is that calling pronouns a subclass of nouns causes too much confusion to be worth it. The number of features that are not common with other types of nouns is long enough and challenging enough to make pronouns seem so exceptional they really should stand alone. Maybe bring them back in for older students who can cope with the sophistication of all the above comments?