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Singular. they. Singular they, along with its inflected or derivative forms, them, their, theirs, and themselves (also themself and theirself ), is a gender-neutral third-person pronoun. It typically occurs with an indeterminate antecedent, in sentences such as: " Somebody left their umbrella in the office.
Antecedent (grammar) In grammar, an antecedent is one or more words that establish the meaning of a pronoun or other pro-form. [ 1] For example, in the sentence "John arrived late because traffic held him up," the word "John" is the antecedent of the pronoun "him." Pro-forms usually follow their antecedents, but sometimes precede them.
Agreement between pronoun (or corresponding possessive adjective) and antecedent also requires the selection of the correct person. For example, if the antecedent is the first person noun phrase Mary and I , then a first person pronoun ( we/us/our ) is required; however, most noun phrases ( the dog , my cats , Jack and Jill , etc.) are third ...
When a noun with conflicting natural and grammatical gender is the antecedent of a pronoun, it may not be clear which gender of pronoun to choose. There is a certain tendency to keep the grammatical gender when a close back-reference is made, but to switch to natural gender when the reference is further away.
Dangling modifier. A dangling modifier (also known as a dangling participle or illogical participle) is a type of ambiguous grammatical construct whereby a grammatical modifier could be misinterpreted as being associated with a word other than the one intended. [ 1] A dangling modifier has no subject and is usually a participle.
A third-person pronoun is a pronoun that refers to an entity other than the speaker or listener. [1] Some languages with gender-specific pronouns have them as part of a grammatical gender system, a system of agreement where most or all nouns have a value for this grammatical category.
Gender neutrality in English. Gender-neutral language is language that avoids assumptions about the social gender or biological sex of people referred to in speech or writing. In contrast to most other Indo-European languages, English does not retain grammatical gender and most of its nouns, adjectives and pronouns are therefore not gender ...
Personal pronoun. Personal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person (as I ), second person (as you ), or third person (as he, she, it, they ). Personal pronouns may also take different forms depending on number (usually singular or plural), grammatical or natural gender, case, and ...