Topic summary
Free variables
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Free variables and bound variables.
Pronouns as free variables
In English, personal pronouns such as he, she, they, and their variants (e.g., her, him) can function as free variables. A free variable is a term whose referent is not determined within the immediate syntactic structure of the sentence and must be identified by the broader context, which can be either linguistic or situational (pragmatic).