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Old English had a single third-person pronoun hē, which had both singular and plural forms, and they wasn't among them. In or about the start of the 13th century, they was imported from a Scandinavian source (Old Norse þeir, Old Danish, Old Swedish þer, þair), in which it was a masculine plural demonstrative pronoun.
A sticker indicating the wearer's use of singular they pronouns. 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 derived from plural they.
Collins COBUILD – English Grammar London: Collins ISBN 0-00-370257-X second edition, 2005 ISBN 0-00-718387-9. Huddleston and Pullman say they found this grammar 'useful' in their Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, p. 1765. A CD-Rom version of the 1st edition is available in the Collins COBUILD Resource Pack ISBN 0-00-716921-3
The English pronouns form a relatively small category of words in Modern English whose primary semantic function is that of a pro-form for a noun phrase. [1] Traditional grammars consider them to be a distinct part of speech, while most modern grammars see them as a subcategory of noun, contrasting with common and proper nouns.
Works of English grammar generally follow the pattern of the European tradition as described above, except that participles are now usually regarded as forms of verbs rather than as a separate part of speech, and numerals are often conflated with other parts of speech: nouns (cardinal numerals, e.g., "one", and collective numerals, e.g., "dozen ...
The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CGEL) says of complex prepositions, In the first place, there is a good deal of inconsistency in the traditional account, as reflected in the practice of dictionaries, as to which combinations are analysed as complex prepositions and which as sequences of adverb + preposition.
The term grammar can also describe the linguistic behaviour of groups of speakers and writers rather than individuals. Differences in scale are important to this meaning: for example, English grammar could describe those rules followed by every one of the language's speakers. [2]
In American English (AmE), collective nouns are almost always singular in construction: the committee was unable to agree. However, when a speaker wishes to emphasize that the individuals are acting separately, a plural pronoun may be employed with a singular or plural verb: the team takes their seats, rather than the team takes its seats.