English grammar - Roger Berry 2012
B2.5 Conclusion
B2 Pronouns
Section B Development
Even though their numbers are small, pronouns are a complicated word class, especially the personal pronouns. We can try to revise the personal pronoun paradigm to take into account some of the factors that have been described above:
Table B2.5.1 The personal pronoun paradigm revised
But this fails to capture all their subtlety, for example:
□ their use for generic reference
□ the various uses of one
□ the role of non-standard forms
□ the choice between using personal pronouns in the first place and some impersonal construction (e.g. the passive), which is important in many types of formal writing.
And we need to ask whether this paradigm is a satisfactory model for describing them.
Comments
Activity B2.1:
The issue here is how to refer back to indefinite (see B3) pronouns such as anyone (or indeed to indefinite noun phrases in general). There are a number of possibilities. Some people would choose he, but the objection to this is that the person might equally be a woman. He or she sounds very awkward, while the unisex s/he is impossible in speech (and rare in writing nowadays). The preferred choice in British English is, perhaps surprisingly, they. It may sound illogical, but it has been common in English for a long time. All we need to do is to accept that they can have indefinite singular reference (which is less strange than suggesting that he can have female reference).
Activity B2.2:
The obvious choice is themselves, but this is plural while anyone is singular. If we follow the logic of the last activity, the answer is themself (like yourself/ yourselves). This does actually occur, though it is rare:
You won’t be the first person who gets themself involved in a holiday romance. How natural does this sound to you?