PRON
: pronoun
Definition
Pronouns are words that substitute for nouns or noun phrases, whose meaning is recoverable from the linguistic or extralinguistic context.
Pronouns under this definition function like nouns. Note that the
German grammar traditionally extends the term pronoun to words that
behave more like articles or adjectives. Such words are not tagged PRON
under our universal scheme. They are tagged as determiners.
For more details on the borderline between PRON
and DET
, see the documentation of DET.
The most prominent category of pronouns is the personal pronouns, which identify their referent by signaling its Person and Number (and sometimes Gender), and which usually occur as subjects or objects in a clause.
Other pronominal types are interrogatives (the referent is the topic of an open question), relatives (used in a relative clause, signal coreference with the noun modified by the clause), indefinites (the identity or quality of the referent is unknown), totals (refering to all members in a set) and negatives (signaling non-existence of a referent).
Every pronoun should have a non-empty value of the PronType feature. Pronouns do not have the Polarity
feature, thus negative pronouns are annotated with PronType=Neg
but not with Polarity=Neg
.
Examples
- personal pronouns: ich “I”, du “you”, er “he”, sie “she”, es “it”, wir “we”, ihr “you”, sie “they”, sich “himself, herself, itself”
- interrogative pronouns: wer “who”, was “what” as in Was denkst du? “What do you think?”
- relative pronouns: der “the one who” as in Ich sehe den Mann, der gestern im Hotel war. “I see the man who was yesterday in the hotel.”
- indefinite pronouns: jemand “somebody”, etwas “something”, man “one”
- total pronouns: jedermann “everybody”
- negative pronouns: niemand “nobody”, nichts “nothing”
PRON in other languages: [bej] [bg] [bm] [cs] [cy] [da] [de] [el] [en] [es] [ess] [et] [fi] [fro] [fr] [ga] [grc] [hu] [hy] [it] [ja] [ka] [kk] [kpv] [ky] [myv] [nci] [no] [pcm] [pt] [qpm] [ru] [sla] [sl] [sv] [tr] [tt] [uk] [u] [urj] [xcl] [yue] [zh]