--- title: Pronouns: I, me, you, they and who — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Pronouns: I, me, you, they and who», a lesson of the language course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: A pronoun stands in for a noun so you don't repeat it: "Mia went to the shop. --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/5-pronouns-i-me-you-they-and-who/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Language](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/) / Pronouns: I, me, you, they and who # Pronouns: I, me, you, they and who Lesson 5 of the language course of Mova's primary school: 20 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/language/5-pronouns-i-me-you-they-and-who/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/5-pronouns-i-me-you-they-and-who/0/) — A pronoun stands in for a noun so you don't repeat it: "Mia went to the shop. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/5-pronouns-i-me-you-they-and-who/1/) — Mia bought milk. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/5-pronouns-i-me-you-they-and-who/2/) — Mia went home" becomes "Mia went to the shop. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/5-pronouns-i-me-you-they-and-who/3/) — She bought milk and went home." - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/5-pronouns-i-me-you-they-and-who/4/) — Pronouns come in two forms: subject forms do the action (I, he, she, we, they) and object forms receive it (me, him, her, us, them); "Sam and I went" but "Mum gave sweets to Ben and me". - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/5-pronouns-i-me-you-they-and-who/5/) — The take-out trick: remove the other person and listen; "Mum gave sweets to I" sounds wrong and "to me" sounds right, so it is "to Ben and me". - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/5-pronouns-i-me-you-they-and-who/6/) — Standard English has no special plural "you", so dialects made their own: youse in Ireland, Liverpool and Glasgow, y'all in the southern US, yinz in Pittsburgh; long ago English had "thou" for one friend and "you" for many or for someone you respected. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/5-pronouns-i-me-you-they-and-who/7/) — A pronoun must point clearly: in "Max told Leo that he had won" nobody knows who won, so a good writer uses a name again. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/5-pronouns-i-me-you-they-and-who/8/) — A pronoun is a word that takes the place of a noun, like I, you, he, she, it, we and they. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/5-pronouns-i-me-you-they-and-who/9/) — Subject pronouns are I, he, she, we, they; object pronouns are me, him, her, us, them. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/5-pronouns-i-me-you-they-and-who/10/) — In standard written English the subject is "Sam and I went"; "me and Sam went" is very common in everyday speech and everyone understands it. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/5-pronouns-i-me-you-they-and-who/11/) — After a verb or a word like "to" or "with", the object form is needed: "to Ben and me", "with them". - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/5-pronouns-i-me-you-they-and-who/12/) — Putting the other person first, as in "Sam and I", is a polite habit. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/5-pronouns-i-me-you-they-and-who/13/) — Youse means you, more than one person, in Ireland, Liverpool, Glasgow, parts of Australia and elsewhere; yinz means you all in Pittsburgh in the US. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/5-pronouns-i-me-you-they-and-who/14/) — Long ago "thou" was the friendly word for one person you knew well, like Ukrainian ти or French tu, and "you" or "ye" was for more than one person or someone you respected. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/5-pronouns-i-me-you-they-and-who/15/) — In parts of Yorkshire and the North some older speakers still say "tha" for you and "thine" for yours; these come from the old thou and thee. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/5-pronouns-i-me-you-they-and-who/16/) — Singular "they" for one person whose gender is unknown has been used since the 1300s; some people today also use it as their own pronoun, and major dictionaries accept both uses. - [17](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/5-pronouns-i-me-you-they-and-who/17/) — Young children often say "him did it" or "me want it"; this is a normal stage, and they grow out of it by hearing the grown-up forms. - [18](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/5-pronouns-i-me-you-they-and-who/18/) — Whom is the old object form of who, like him for he; it is now mostly used in formal writing, especially after a word like "to" ("to whom"). - [19](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/5-pronouns-i-me-you-they-and-who/19/) — The antecedent is the noun a pronoun points back to; a pronoun is ambiguous when it could point to more than one person. - ← previous: [Adjectives and adverbs: describing things and actions](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/4-adjectives-and-adverbs/) - next →: [Prepositions and conjunctions: little words that hold sentences together](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/6-prepositions-and-conjunctions/) - ↑ back to [Language](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/)