The SAGE Encyclopedia of Communication Sciences and Disorders

Nouns and pronouns

The noun is the most fundamental grammatical category in all languages of the world,
together with verbs. The core semantic properties of nouns are similar in all languages.
Nouns are mastered by children from the earliest age and all children with language
disorders can use nouns, although they may not be able to master complex noun
constructions.

The pronoun is a much more complex and diverse category, and contains various subtypes
of elements, which are not all present in all languages. The complexity and abstractness of
pronouns make them prone to create difficulties in young children’s language and in
children with language impairment.

Although pronouns are strongly related to nouns (as they often, but not always, stand for a
noun), their properties are very different from the properties of nouns. So, we will clearly
separate the presentation of nouns, in the first part, from pronouns, in the second part.

Nouns
Nouns are defined by their form and their meaning (or function), as is the case for all
language categories. The dual definition (form and meaning) of nouns underlies widely
different linguistic approaches, formalist or functionalist.

Nouns are first defined by their meaning: a prototypical noun is a word that refers to an
object or a person. For example:
This is a book. This is Peter.
In these utterances, “book” and “Peter” are nouns. They refer to objects or people in the
world. The ability to refer is fundamental to what a noun is. In these examples, “Peter” does
not need any more information to be understood: this noun, a proper noun, has a clear
unique reference in a given context. “book”, on the contrary, comes with a determiner “a”
(see entry “Determiners”). Other determiners can be used, which would induce different
meanings, even in the same context. For example, using “the book” instead of “a book”
suggests that “the book” refers to a specific book and that “the book” was already known in
some way or another.

There are two fundamental types of nouns: proper nouns and common nouns. Proper nouns
are names of specific people, places, days, months, etc. In most cases, they denote unique
referents, which makes it possible to avoid the use of any grammatical markers, unlike
common nouns (see below). Also, as they are unique, they are not ambiguous, so their
grammatical category is lexically defined. Proper nouns can be extended to be used as
common nouns, in which case they are accompanied by a determiner like common nouns.
The specific grammatical features of proper nouns are not present in all languages. There
are languages where proper nouns have the same syntactic properties as common nouns,
but different semantic properties.

Common nouns have a generic meaning. They can denote one specific element, several
elements, a whole set, a substance, or a quality. To differentiate the various uses, markers
can be found on the noun (such as determiners). These markers and the position of the noun
in a sentence also define the form of the noun category. Every word that has these markers
will be a noun, regardless of whether it refers to an object or a person, or something else.

The fact that nouns can be identified on the basis of the form is fundamental in language
because this makes it possible to extend the reference of prototypical nouns to things that
are not objects or persons. This explains how it is possible for example to extend the
meaning of a verb to that of a noun. Another use is that a noun can refer to abstract
principles, to actions, to elements in language, to qualities, to feelings, etc., even when there
is no actual thing that can be pointed at, as is possible for an object or a person. In this case,
the notion of reference is maintained, and common agreement within a linguistic
community around a shared word form helps to define new meanings and new concepts.

The form of nouns (especially common nouns) is specific to each language, as the way nouns
can be marked varies a lot from one language to another. For example, in English, nouns can
carry number and are preceded by a determiner and adjectives. There is a different form to
mark count nouns and mass nouns. Count nouns are used to refer to elements that can be
denoted as individual items, for example, “a book”, “two books”, “ten books”. Mass nouns
correspond to a substance or quality, for example, “information”, “some information”, but
not “two informations”. In Spanish and French, nouns have gender, but there is no
systematic difference between count nouns and mass nouns. In German, nouns carry gender
and number, but also case, which indicates the relationship between a noun and the verb it
accompanies in an utterance. In Chinese, nouns do not carry any marker, but can be
accompanied by classifiers similar to those that exist in English for mass nouns. For example,
一本书 (yì běn shū) which means “one book” corresponds to “one (yì) volume (běn) of book
(shū)”. The structure is similar to “a loaf of bread” (“of” is not necessary in the Chinese
construction), but is used for all words, not only mass nouns. There is no specific
construction for count nouns in Chinese.

Language acquisition
Nouns are among the very first words understood and produced by young children. The first
two words produced by 8-month-olds are “mommy” and “daddy”, two nouns. In this case,
they should be considered as proper nouns. At the age of 12 months, words produced by
more than 10% of children are either onomatopoeias, interjections or communicators (bye,
hi, uh, oh, baa baa, yum yum, grrr, woof woof, vroom, night night, ouch, thank you, quack
quack, peekaboo), or nouns (mommy, daddy, ball, dog, baby, bottle, kitty, duck, banana, cat,
grandma, shoe, bird). The frequency of nouns in early child vocabularies has been explained
by a bias toward whole objects, as whole objects and consequently names for whole objects
(i.e. nouns) are cognitively simpler. The bias found for English-speaking children exists for
many other languages. However, there are languages where this bias is not as strong,
especially languages (Korean, Mandarin) where verbs are more frequent and
morphosyntactically less complex than nouns.
The advantage for nouns also exists when children learn to use words productively with
adequate syntax. They are able to do so in English earlier for nouns than for verbs.
Pronouns
As the etymology of the word indicates (from latin pronomen: pro “stands for”, nomem
“noun”), pronouns stand for nouns. However, as is often the case in linguistics, the reality is
more complex. There are several sets of pronouns (called representing pronouns) that can
be used in the place of a noun (called the antecedent), which avoids repetition of the noun.
For example: “A sparrow is a kind of bird. It can fly.” – “it” refers to “sparrow”. But not all
pronouns correspond to a noun. Other pronouns (called nominal pronouns) refer to people
or objects, but not directly to previous nouns – for example: “I cannot fly” – “I” refers to the
speaker but not necessarily to any previous noun. In this case, pronouns do not represent a
noun, but they are used in a syntactic position where a noun phrase can occur and they
express meanings that cannot be expressed using nouns. Also, in some cases, pronouns can
be used to express a merely formal subject (such as “it” in “it rained”), which is called
impersonal use.

When taking the place of a noun, pronouns have the same semantic value not only as the
noun, but usually as the whole noun phrase. The reference is semantic and preserves the
gender and the number (for languages where these categories exist). However, the
reference does not take into account the syntactic position of the antecedent. The pronoun
will have a syntactic form that is independent from the syntactic form of the antecedent.
The pronoun can take the position of any verb argument or any adverbial. This explains why
pronouns are often marked for case. For example:
He gives it to him.
“He”, “it”, “him” are pronouns. “He” is in the nominative case, “it” in the accusative case and
“him” in the dative case, and here more specifically the recipient. “He” is marked both by
the position (before the verb) and lexically (“he” is always nominative). “it” and “him” are
marked only by their position in the sentence, as they would have other cases if they were in
another position in the sentence.

Some pronouns do not refer to nouns. This is the case for the first person (the speaker) and
the second person (the addressee). This is also the case in speech when the antecedent is
semantically or pragmatically obvious, or when language is accompanied by gesture,
pointing, and stance. In these situations, third person pronouns or demonstrative pronouns
are used.

Pronouns are traditionally divided into classes according to their syntactic role or their
semantic value: personal, possessive, demonstrative, relative, interrogative, indefinite.

Personal pronouns refer to the grammatical person (first person, second person, third
person). In some languages, personal pronouns can have different lexical values depending
on their grammatical case. For example, in English “I” is the first person personal pronoun
for the nominative case, whereas “me” is the first person personal pronoun for other cases.
In some languages, there is a subset of personal pronouns, clitic pronouns, which have to be
used with a verb as they express the arguments of the verb. For example, this is the case in
English for “he”. Other pronouns such as “him” can be used as clitics (e.g. “he thanks him”)
or independently (e.g. “who is it? Him!”). In other languages, for example Spanish, there is
no clitic nominative personal pronoun because the verb form contains a marker that refers
directly to the subject (which corresponds to the nominative). Thus in Spanish, “hablo”
means “I speak” and “I” corresponds to the suffix “-o”. This form is different from the second
person and third person so clitic pronouns are unnecessary to discriminate persons. Clitic
pronouns are important as they can create difficulties in language development and in
children with language disorders.

Possessive pronouns are pronouns that contain semantic information about something
owned by someone or something. For example:
Look at this hat. It is mine.
“mine” is a possessive pronoun that, as a pronoun, refers to “this hat” and as a possessive
pronoun refers to the speaker herself.

Demonstrative pronouns are pronouns with deictic reference, which depends on the
context shared by the speaker/writer and the hearer/reader. The reference can be to an
object in a conversation or some shared knowledge. For example:
Look! This is a famous painting.
“this” is a demonstrative pronoun that refers to an object in the real-world or discourse
context but not to a noun or an antecedent.

Relative pronouns are pronouns that link and organize relative clauses with respect to the
main clause. For example:
This one is “The Mona Lisa”, which is a famous painting.
In English, relative pronouns are “that”, “which”, “who”, “whom”, “whose”, and the zero
form (“that” can be omitted). In English, their syntactic position is to introduce relative
clauses. Relative pronouns can have a syntactic function of subject, complement, adverbial,
postmodifier, prepositional complement, or object in the relative clause, irrespective of their
position as the first word of the clause.

Interrogative pronouns are, in English, similar to the relative wh-pronouns, with the
addition of “what”. However, they do not refer to an antecedent, but on the contrary are
used for requesting information which was not previously known. This category of pronouns
is a good example of the dual role of many pronouns, which is to refer to previous language,
or to be used in a syntactic position where a noun or a noun phrase can be found, and used
in this case with semantic values that are more generic than nouns.

Indefinite pronouns are used to refer to people or things without saying exactly who or
what they are, instead of having a specific reference, unlike other pronouns. In English, these
pronouns are everybody, somebody, anybody, nobody, and similar sets built around -one, -
thing, and -where. Indefinite pronouns are a good example of how pronouns can be used to
express new meanings where no specific word (or noun) can apply.

Language acquisition
There is a lot of variation in the mastery of pronouns in language acquisition because the
category contains many elements that vary hugely in terms of phonological complexity,
frequency, and grammatical complexity. The main results in the acquisition of pronouns by
English-speaking children could be described as follows. When children start to combine
words in their second year, they will often use their own name or a term such as “baby”
rather than “I” or “me”. This often reflects the way adults speak to the child and is an echo
of child-directed speech. The first pronoun used productively is “it”, which is used for
objects. The second pronoun used productively is one with first person reference, such as
“me”, “my”, “mine”, or “I”. Some confusion is observed in the use of pronoun cases,
especially for subject pronouns. Similar confusion also occurs for object pronouns, for
example “me”, “him”, “her”, “us”, “them” can be used even where they are not used by
adults. Plural pronouns occur later than singular forms, and second person pronouns occur
later than first and third person forms. By age 3, normally-developing children produce 71%
of correct third person singular forms, and 98% by age 5.

Language disorders
As for language acquisition, there is a large variety of behavior in the children with language
impairment when they are handling pronouns. Children with specific language impairment
(SLI) have considerable difficulties with morphosyntactic markings, with complex
phonological patterns, and complex grammatical constructions. They are usually efficient
when using simple constructions that underlie basic linguistic interactions. For instance, they
are usually efficient in using constructions acquired by young children but have difficulties
when handling the linguistic structures acquired when children are older. This is confirmed
by various results on different languages. Weak stressed forms such as subject pronouns are
difficult for children with SLI, as compared to MLU-matched normally-developing children.
Not all studies confirmed the existence of difficulties when comparing language-matched
children, but the difficulties with personal pronouns were confirmed when comparing age-
matched children.
Another example of specific difficulties with pronouns is the case of accusative clitic
pronouns in Romance languages. For example, in French-speaking children, the accusative
clitic production remained weak long after childhood in adolescents whose language
developed atypically, no matter what the cause of the atypical development was. It
suggested that the computation involved in the production of these elements places a
particularly heavy load on performance systems. Similar results and explanations are
suggested for another Romance language, Portuguese.

Christelle Maillart1 and Christophe Parisse2

Further readings
Baker, M. C. (2003). Lexical Categories: Verbs, Nouns and Adjectives. Cambridge University
Press.
Croft, W., & Cruse, D. A. (2004). Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge University Press.
Gentner, D. (1982). Why nouns are learned before verbs: Linguistic relativity versus natural
partitioning. In S. A. K. II (Ed.), Language development, vol. 2. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates.
Goldberg, A. E. (2006). Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gopnik, A., & Choi, S. (1995). Names, relational words, and cognitive development in Eng-
lish and Korean speakers: Nouns are not always learned before verbs. In M. Tomasello & W.
E. Merriman (Eds.), Beyond names for things: Young children’s acquisition of verbs (pp. 63–
80). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Moore, M. E. (2001). Third person pronoun errors by children with and without language
impairment. Journal of Communication Disorders, 34(3), 207–228.
Tomasello, M., Akhtar, N., Dodson, K., & Rekau, L. (1997). Differential productivity in young
children’s use of nouns and verbs. Journal of Child Language, 24, 373–387.

Cross references

Grammar
Grammatical Development
language disorders in children,
morphology
Adjectives and Adverbs
determiners
Syntactic Disorders
Syntax and Grammar