Forms of pronouns and determiners

In morphology we are mainly concerned with the behavior of words which belong to open classes, namely nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs. These classes are so called because their membership can be added to, and indeed is added to constantly as new words come into use. By contrast, one does not expect in English to encounter a new pronoun (a word such as I or she or us) or a new preposition (a word such as in or at or without). However, determiners deserve a mention here because some of them, like nouns, display a singular–plural contrast, and pronouns combine a singular–plural contrast with contrast unique to them, between subject and non-subject forms.

We have already encountered the distinction between this and these, as in this pianist and these pianists. These are the singular and plural forms of the determiner lexeme THIS. Other determiners include THE, A(N) and SOME, but only one other determiner exhibits a singular–plural contrast: THAT, with singular and plural forms that and those. The determiners THAT and THIS demonstrate that number contrasts can have a grammatical effect inside noun phrase as well as between subject noun phrases and their accompanying verbs.

In many languages, the distinction that English expresses by word order in John loves Mary and Mary loves John is expressed by inflectional means on the words corresponding to Mary and John. In English, the same technique is used for one small closed class of lexemes, namely personal pronouns. If one replaces John and Mary with the appropriate pronouns in these two examples, the outcome is as in (26) and (27):

(26) He loves her.

(27) She loves him.

He and him are sometimes said to contrast in case, he belonging to the nominative case and him belonging to the accusative case. This kind of inflection has only a marginal role in English, being limited to pronouns; but, if we treat (say) HE as a lexeme, we must recognize it as having two forms: he and him. It is striking that the relationship between nominative and accusative forms is consistently suppletive, as in I/me, she/her, we/us, and they/them, except that for YOU the two forms are identical (you). This is consistent with the fact that pronouns are very common, and suppletion affects only very common words such as GO.

If he and him are forms of the lexeme HE, and we and us are forms of WE (and so on), what are we to say about corresponding words with a possessive meaning: his and our, as well as my, her, your and their? Syntactically and semantically, these words fulfil just the same role as noun phrases with the aspostrophe-s: his bicycle means ‘the bicycle belonging to him’ just as that man’s bicycle means ‘the bicycle belonging to that man’. One possibility is to say that these are pronoun forms belonging to a third case, the genitive or possessive, which stand in for apostrophe-s forms in noun phrases that consist only of a personal pronoun. Another is to classify these words as determiners, because they perform a determiner-like role and cannot be combined with other determiners (we cannot say *the my hat any more than we can say *the that hat). But these are issues of syntax rather than morphology. For present purposes, we need merely note how his, our and the rest behave, while leaving their exact grammatical classification undecided.