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The pronoun who, in English, is an interrogative pronoun and a relative pronoun, used primarily to refer to persons.. Unmarked, who is the pronoun's subjective form; its inflected forms are the objective whom and the possessive whose.
Users of the inanimate whose employ it as a relative pronoun with non-personal antecedents, as in: "That's the car whose alarm keeps waking us up at night." Those who avoid using whose with non-personal antecedents assert that it is the genitive (possessive) of only the relative pronoun who. They employ alternatives such as of which the, as in: [1]
The English relative words are words in English used to mark a clause, noun phrase or preposition phrase as relative. The central relative words in English include who, whom, whose, which, why, and while, as shown in the following examples, each of which has the relative clause in bold: We should celebrate the things which we hold dear.
The words used as relative pronouns have other uses in English grammar: that can be a demonstrative or a conjunction, while which, what, who, whom and whose can be interrogatives. For other uses of whoever etc., see -ever .
The English personal pronouns are a subset of English pronouns taking various forms according to number, person, case and grammatical gender. Modern English has very little inflection of nouns or adjectives, to the point where some authors describe it as an analytic language, but the Modern English system of personal pronouns has preserved some of the inflectional complexity of Old English and ...
The element in the main clause that the relative pronoun in the relative clause stands for (house in the above example) is the antecedent of that pronoun.In most cases the antecedent is a nominal (noun or noun phrase), though the pronoun can also refer to a whole proposition, as in "The train was late, which annoyed me greatly", where the antecedent of the relative pronoun which is the clause ...
The interrogative words who, whom, whose, what and which are interrogative pronouns when used in the place of a noun or noun phrase. In the question Who is the leader? , the interrogative word who is a interrogative pronoun because it stands in the place of the noun or noun phrase the question prompts (e.g. the king or the woman with the crown ).
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.