One of a group of pronouns used to refer mainly to people, but also to things. They can be classified by person, e.g. I (speaker/writer: first person), you (addressee: second person), she/he/it (others: third person).
I’m sitting here looking out of the window. Nothing’s happening; it never does. I sit here every day for hours on end, just looking. Looking for what? I don’t know. They never told me what I should be looking for. And I’ve never found out.
I once thought I’d found something, but I couldn’t be sure. It might just have been a trick of the light. How was I to tell?
Pronouns are one of the eight word classes in the National Curriculum. Some linguists would treat pronouns as a subclass of nouns, and there are some good reasons for that, but we adhere to the National Currciulum specifications.
Pronouns can sometimes replace a noun in a sentence:
Pronouns behave in some ways like nouns and can sometimes replace them in a sentence. For this reason, pronouns are often treated as a subclass of nouns and there are some good reasons for doing this, but they are – in some important ways – different from nouns.
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