In
linguistics, an object pronoun is a
personal pronoun that is used typically as a
grammatical object: the direct or indirect object of a verb, or the object of a preposition. Object pronouns contrast with
subject pronoun
In linguistics, a subject pronoun is a personal pronoun that is used as the subject of a verb. Subject pronouns are usually in the nominative case for languages with a nominative–accusative alignment pattern. On the other hand, a language with ...
s. Object pronouns in English take the ''
objective case'', sometimes called the ''oblique case'' or ''object case''.
[ Randolph Quirk, ]Sidney Greenbaum
Sidney Greenbaum (31 December 1929 – 28 May 1996) was a British scholar of the English language and of linguistics. He was Quain Professor of English language and literature at the University College London from 1983 to 1990 and Director ...
, Geoffrey Leech
Geoffrey Neil Leech FBA (16 January 1936 – 19 August 2014) was a specialist in English language and linguistics. He was the author, co-author, or editor of over 30 books and over 120 published papers. His main academic interests were English ...
, and Jan Svartvik, ''A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language'' (London: Longman, 1985), p. 337.
For example, the English object pronoun ''me'' is found in "They see me" (direct object), "He's giving me my book" (indirect object), and "Sit with me" (object of a preposition); this contrasts with the subject pronoun in "I see them," "I am getting my book," and "I am sitting here."
English
The English personal and interrogative pronouns have the following subject and object forms:
Archaic second person forms
Historically,
Middle English and
Early Modern English retained the
T–V distinction; the
second person pronoun had separate singular/familiar and plural/formal forms with subject and object forms of both. In standard modern forms of English, all second person forms have been reduced to simply "you". These forms are still retained (sometimes partially) in some dialects of
Northern English,
Scottish English, and in the
Scots language, a Germanic language closely related to English which diverged from it during the Early Modern period.
Other languages
In some languages the ''direct'' object pronoun and the ''indirect'' object pronoun have separate forms. For example, in the
Spanish object pronoun
Spanish object pronouns are Spanish personal pronouns that take the function of the object in the sentence. Object pronouns may be both clitic and non-clitic, with non-clitic forms carrying greater emphasis. When used as clitics, object pronouns a ...
system, ''direct object'': Lo mandaron a la escuela (They sent him to school) and ''indirect object'': Le mandaron una carta (They sent him a letter). Other languages divide object pronouns into a larger variety of classes.
On the other hand, many languages, for example Persian, do not have distinct object pronouns: ''Man Farsi balad-am'' (I can speak
Persian). ''Man ra mishenasad.'' (He knows me).
History
Object pronouns, in languages where they are distinguished from subject pronouns, are typically a vestige of an older
case
Case or CASE may refer to:
Containers
* Case (goods), a package of related merchandise
* Cartridge case or casing, a firearm cartridge component
* Bookcase, a piece of furniture used to store books
* Briefcase or attaché case, a narrow box to c ...
system. English, for example, once had an extensive
declension system that specified distinct
accusative and
dative
In grammar, the dative case (abbreviated , or sometimes when it is a core argument) is a grammatical case used in some languages to indicate the recipient or beneficiary of an action, as in "Maria Jacobo potum dedit", Latin for "Maria gave Jacob a ...
case ''forms'' for both nouns and pronouns. And after a
preposition
Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in traditional grammar, simply prepositions), are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in'', ''under'', ''towards'', ''before'') or mark various ...
, a noun or pronoun could be in either of these cases, or in the
genitive
In grammar, the genitive case (abbreviated ) is the grammatical case that marks a word, usually a noun, as modifying another word, also usually a noun—thus indicating an attributive relationship of one noun to the other noun. A genitive can al ...
or
instrumental case. With the exception of the genitive (the
"apostrophe-s" form), in nouns this system disappeared entirely, while in personal pronouns it collapsed into a single case, covering the roles of both accusative and dative, as well as all instances after a preposition. That is, the new oblique (object) case came to be used for the object of either a verb or a preposition, contrasting with the genitive, which links two nouns.
For a discussion of the use of historically object pronouns in subject position in English (e.g. "Jay and me will arrive later"), see the article on
English personal pronouns
The English personal pronouns are a subset of English pronouns taking various forms according to grammatical number, number, grammatical person, person, grammatical case, case and natural gender. Modern English has very little inflection of nouns ...
.
See also
*
Object (grammar)
*
Subject (grammar)
The subject in a simple English sentence such as ''John runs'', ''John is a teacher'', or ''John drives a car'', is the person or thing about whom the statement is made, in this case ''John''. Traditionally the subject is the word or phrase whi ...
References
{{lexical categories, state=collapsed
Personal pronouns