Personal pronouns and their plural forms

Personal pronouns and their plural forms posit a lot of problems among English learners. While a handful can only state the examples of personal pronouns, majority neither know these examples nor their plural forms. Therefore, this article adequately discusses personal pronoun, its examples and plural forms.

Before taking a trip to the home town of personal pronoun, it is very important we first pay a visit to its ancestor --- pronoun. A pronoun is a word that is used instead of a noun in a sentence. In other words, a pronoun is a word that is eligible to take the place of a noun in a sentence.

Example:

• John is very intelligent and he likes playing football.

In the sentence above, "he" is a pronoun and it is used instead of "John" which is a noun in the first clause.

In English, pronouns are mostly used to avoid repetition. This is clearly exemplified in the sentence above where "he" is used instead of "John" in the second clause in order to avoid the repetition of "John" in the sentence. Without the pronoun "he", the sentence would have been "John is very intelligent and John likes playing football".

There are different types of pronoun: personal, reflexive, possessive, relative, interrogative, demonstrative and indefinite; but as earlier stated, this article discusses personal pronoun. Personal pronoun is a pronoun that is primarily associated with person(s).

TYPES OF PERSONAL PRONOUN

1. First person
This is the person speaking or reporting. The first person is further divided into two: the first person singular, which are "I & me" and the first person plural, which are "we & us".

2. Second person
This is the person being addressed or spoken to. This is further classified into two: the second person singular (you) and the second person plural (you). "You" remains "you" whether in singular or plural form.

3. Third person 
This is the person being spoken about or being discussed. Just like other types, it is divided into two: the third person singular (he, she, it, him & her) and the third person plural (they & them).

As seen above, personal pronoun may be singular or plural and may appear in the subjective case or objective case.

PERSONAL PRONOUNS APPEARING IN SUBJECT POSITION AND THEIR PLURAL FORMS

Subject form (singular)	Plural form
I	We
You	You
He/she/it	They

Sentence Examples

• I love Tammy.
• You love Tammy.
• He/she/it loves Tammy.
• We love Tammy.
• You love Tammy.
• They love Tammy.

From the sentence examples above, you can see that all the personal pronouns appear in the subject position.

PERSONAL PRONOUNS APPEARING IN OBJECT POSITION AND THEIR PLURAL FORMS

Object form (singular)	Plural form
Me	Us
You	You
Him/her/it	Them

Sentence examples

• Tammy loves me.
• I love you.
• Tammy loves him/her/it.
• Tammy loves us.
• Tammy loves you.
• Tammy loves them.

Unlike in the first sentence examples, the personal pronouns in these sentence examples occupy the object position to show that they appear in object form.

ALL PERSONAL PRONOUNS IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE

All personal pronouns of English are grouped under their singular and plural forms in the table below.

Personal pronoun (singular form)	Personal pronoun (plural form)
I	We
You	You
He/she/it	They
Me	Us
You	You
Him/her/it	Them

I hope the lesson was understood? Don't hesitate to use the comment box if you need clarification!