Relative pronouns who, whose, which, that, as not only point back to a noun or a pronoun mentioned before, but also have conjunctive power, since their function is to introduce attributive clauses. Their status of pronouns is rather relative, since they combine both the function of pure syntactic con­nectors and the ability to be a […]

Interrogative pronouns are used in inquiry, to form special questions. Here belong who, whom, whose, what, which. Whom is the form of the ob­jective case of the pronoun who but there is a steady tendency in English for this form to be replaced by the nominative form who. The interrogative pronouns, due to their function, […]

Reflexive pronouns point out that the doer of an action is identical with the object of this action. In modern English there is a distinct tendency to drop reflexive pronouns if this omission does not affect the meaning of the utterance: In the morning I wash (myself), dress (myself) and have my break­fast. Alongside of […]

Demonstrative pronouns differ quite distinctly from other groups of pro­nouns, since they point out a person, a thing, an event directly. The demon­strative pronouns are very different both morphologically and syntactically. For example, only the pronouns this and that have the category of number: this – these, that – those. The demonstrative pronouns arc subdivided […]

The pronouns my, his, her, its, our, your, their have the meaning of pos­session. Syntactically, they modify nouns and may be syntactically equaled to the article: a car, my car, a (the) new car, my new car. Possessive pronouns have two forms, namely the dependent (or con­joint) form and the independent (or absolute) form. In […]

The personal pronouns are characterized by quite different values for the language. The first person pronouns — I, we — as well as the second person pronoun you do not substitute for anything and do not share their functions with anything, since they represent the speaker and the hearer in commu­nication. The personal pronouns of […]

Notional words signifying states and used as predicatives were first identified as a separate part of speech in the Russian language by academi­cians Lev Shcherba and Viktor Vinogradov. The two scholars defined the categorical meaning of the newly identified part of speech as that of state (and, correspondingly, separate words making up this category were […]

Pronouns have every right to the reputation of a part of speech difficult to classify, since they include words very different lexically, syntactically and grammatically. Thus, if the syntactic principle is chosen as the basis of classification, then pronouns are divided into nominal and adjectival. If, however, these pronouns are further divided into groups, then […]

It is known that an adjective denotes a property of some referent ex­pressed by a noun. The property may be that of material, colour, size, position, state, and other characteristics both permanent and temporary. It fol­lows from this that, unlike nouns, adjectives do not possess a full nomina­tive value. The semantically bound character of the […]

The main syntactic function of adjectives is that of an attribute. As a rule, attributes expressed by adjectives precede nouns that are modified. However, attributes may also occur in a post-position, which gives them additional emphasis: A plastic ball, in white and yellow stripes, rolled softly and with decep­tive slowness from one dry tuft of […]