This is one of the problems with modern education. That's a grade school definition of a pronoun. As such, it's effective for its purposes as a pedagogical tool, but isn't useful beyond that, just like in physics, a Newtonian model is incredibly useful to teaching high school, but disappears rather quickly once you get into contemporary theoretical work.Jason Hare wrote:Would you suggest thinking of it as a pronoun in such a way that it might be considered "this [one] the man," where each is essentially a substantive in some sort of appositional relationship? I have a hard time thinking of a pronoun (and, yes, as far as I've always learned a pronoun is such a thing that replaces a noun, not modifies it) as being necessarily paired to a noun phrase in direct modification.
So traditionally a pronoun is a grammatical element that replaces a noun (or in David's terms above, a noun phrase). Thus we have instances where that gets two separate categories
The traditional approach would say that (1a) is a demonstrative pronoun and that (1b) is a demonstrative adjective. Or something like that. The problem is that in both cases, this is functioning in an identical manner, both are referentially deictic, point at a real world entity. So what we have, then, in the grade school categorization is a situation where the category is defined by a preconceived definition rather than actual function.Example (1) wrote:a. This is my book.
b. This book is mine.
Conversely, we have a definition of pronouns provided by professional grammarians from the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language:
And that's a definition that would say that all instances of this are pronominal because in both cases, the word is deictic. I'm inclined to think that Huddleston and Pullum's definition works rather well for Greek, too.Huddleston & Pullum wrote:Pronouns constitute a closed category of words whose most central members are characteristically used deictically or anaphorically.
Then I can assume that you don't think the article is a determiner? It's syntax and its function is different than that of the demonstrative. And that's been your criteria thus far...unless you have some other criteria that you haven't stated...David Lim wrote:I consider a demonstrative that appears in predicate position to be a determiner, which I indeed distinguish from adjectives based on their different syntax. Under this definition it is clear that a word may appear in more than one class, but the classes they fall in are already fixed by the language and not easily subject to change. I am aware that "determiner" may not mean the same thing to you, but for lack of a better word, I use "determiner" to refer to any word that functions that way syntactically.