New answers tagged pronouns
6
“Hither, page, and stand by me
If thou know’st it, telling
Yonder peasant, who is he?
Where and what his dwelling?”
“Sire, he lives a good league hence
Underneath the mountain
Right against the forest fence
By Saint Agnes’ fountain.”
The simple answer is that no, the only standard ones are this, that, these, ...
1
I'm not sure about the syntactic tree, but "who" would be the correct pronoun. The clause that governs is "Who he is?," which could also be written "Who is he?, and "He is who?" The verb "is" (to be) is a linking verb. With linking verbs, the object is the same case as the subject (not the object case: whom). "Whom did you bring?"uses the object pronoun ...
1
The truth is, this is not exactly a great question. Both are grammatically acceptable. What you should think to yourself here, however, is which is slightly clearer. The addition of the "it was" verb phrase makes it manifest that the writer is comparing "the construction industry’s economic health" from five year's ago. That said, any fluent English speaker ...
1
As we see in the comments,
Everybody didn't know X
is ambiguous. It could mean
Not everybody knew X = at least one person was ignorant of X
or it could mean
Nobody knew X = everyone was ignorant of X
2
Native speakers do not usually confuse "he" and "she" (that is, they don't use one in place of the other). When talking about people, the distinction is made consistently and obligatorily in all registers of the language, both formal and vernacular. There may be some dialects that have different usage, but if so, they are not well-known to the speakers of ...
2
Native speakers rarely use the wrong pronoun. The recognition of the sex of the subject is very consistent.
I think most native speakers remember people's genders, in order to use the correct pronoun. One thing that helps is that most names are gendered, which makes it easy to guess which pronoun to use.
I agree, it can be difficult for non-native speakers....
1
[1] Ed hurt himself.
[2] Ed himself designed the house.
Reflexive pronouns have two main uses:
a complement use where they are obligatory, as in [1], and an emphatic use where they are optional, as in [2].
It's the latter use that is sometimes called 'intensifying'.
1
Grammatically it's ambiguous, so we use common sense to disambiguate it. It doesn't make sense for the subjects to be worth risks -- we don't generally apply "worth" to people, and even when we do (such as determining compensation for causing the death of a loved one), it's hard to see how you could equate them with risks.
Furthermore, it's common to ...
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