Let's talk about indefinite pronouns. Now
this is quite a large category of
pronouns, as you can see, although some of
them overlap a bit with each other. So if
you look at "another," "anybody," "anyone,"
"anything," they all start with "any." And
that way you can definitely narrow them
down quite a bit. Now what indefinite
pronouns do is they refer back to a noun
in the vaguest way possible. So they have
a ... vague reference point.
They don't refer to any specific
person, place, quantity, or thing, so no
specific person,
thing, etc, and you can see that from
these. If you were to say "no one," what
does that actually refer to?
Well it refers to an absence of something, I
suppose. So one way to think about these
then is that these are indefinite--
they're not quite as specific, but
some are more specific than others. So,
for instance, if you say, let's see here,
"either,"
"either" would have to be one of two
options typically. So you'll see that
some are more specific than others, but
this general description is definitely
apt, that on the whole they are fairly
indefinite. Another way in which we can
kind of categorize them is to split them
up a bit. So some of these refer to
universal categories. So a universal
category is a very large category that
encompasses everything, quite literally,
or everybody, all the different people.
But others refer to an absence of things.
So these are negative indefinite
pronouns, and we have ones like that as
well. We have "no one," as mentioned, we
have "nothing,"
we have "none," and we have a number of
different ways then to split up these
pronouns. We can see that from these
examples here as well. So if we want to
split up the pronouns in a different way,
again, we can look at these indefinite
pronouns as referring to
nouns in different ways. So if you look
at the first example here, "everybody,"
"everybody" doesn't refer to any
particular noun close to it. But if we
look at "many," "many" would have to refer,
probably, to some kind of previous noun
that we just had, so this could be
people, let's say, could be my friends, but
presumably there has to be some kind of
reference point just before we get to
this sentence;
otherwise, it's very difficult to know
what "many" refers to. "Everybody," on the
other hand, doesn't seem to have really
any reference point, any noun that it
refers back to because, well, it's
"everybody," it's all the people in the
world, let's say, so it doesn't need
that reference. And then, the last one
here, "all"--this one first slightly forward,
so it refers to the bullies, the noun that
comes afterwards. And notice how it's
functioning differently as well; it's
actually functioning like an adjective.
So sometimes you'll see indefinite
pronouns taking on the job of other
parts of speech, and one common way in
which they do that is as an adjective.
So, what kind of bullies? Well, all bullies.
And now you can see how we can classify
these indefinite pronouns
as doing a number of different things in
terms of how they relate back or
forwards to different nouns. There's a
lot that we can say about indefinite
pronouns, and we don't have time to cover
them in depth here, but I think one thing
we can focus on is the issue of
agreement. And if you were to go back to
the beginning of the video and just look
at the chart again, you'll see that a lot
of these pronouns are either singular or
they are plural in form, and then some
are singular or plural. So that gets a
little bit confusing, and I just want to
shed some light on what that means in
terms of what we call agreement. So
agreement is the relationship between
the pronoun and the verb that comes
later. And often we have to figure out
which one agrees in terms of number
and person with the earlier
pronoun.
So if you look at this example, "each" is
pretty much always a singular pronoun,
and that means that it has to take a
singular verb, so we would pick "was." And
this can be confusing because, from the
context, we know that this is actually
referring to multiple people. "Each
of the Olympic athletes' coaches"-- "coaches"
is plural, and so we might think, well,
there are multiple coaches: we maybe need
"were," which is the plural verb. But don't
let that confuse you. Most of the time,
"each" remains singular. Some of the other
pronouns are a bit more ambiguous. If you
look, for instance, at "none," "none" can be
singular or plural depending on the
context. Some grammarians are going to be
sticklers about this; they will insist
that none refers to "no one," and "one" is
singular, and that's why it should be,
"none of the horses smokes" (not one "smokes
cigars"). But there are multiple horses, and
I think most of us would say, well, you
know, we're talking about all of these
horses, so "smoke" should be the correct
verb. And there's no easy answer to this;
it depends on how strict you want your
rules of grammar to be. But just be aware
of that, that some of these
pronouns are singular or plural
depending on context, and you really have
to look at the context to see which one
is meant. Tricky ones include
"everyone" and "everybody." If
you look at these closely you'll see
that "body" and "one"--these refer to
singular things, one body, now we're
referring to every single body, but we're
kind of implying that there is just one body
we're talking about.
Same thing with "one." Every single
one, you might say. So in that case, if you
insist on this being "one" and "body," you
would say "every single one should have a
donor card in his or her wallet." We
do want to be sensitive to gender in
this case, so we would pick "his or her."
And it makes sense, then, that we have "his
or her" because "his or her" is singular
and "one" is singular as well. But the truth is
that some of these pronouns, which in
the chart earlier you only see
in the singular category, are starting to
shift somewhat, and "their" is becoming
more common. So this is often called
"singular they," which is, of
course, typically inappropriate, but
you're going to start seeing this more
and more, that people just resort to
saying "their" because they know that in
general "everyone" does refer to
multiple people; it's just that
grammatically it does not. So to summarize
then what we've seen is that agreement
can be tricky with indefinite pronouns.
Some of these pronouns are clearly in
the singular category, some are in the
plural category, some are in both, and
then some, like "everyone" and "everybody,"
are in the singular category, but usage
is starting to shift. And just watch out
for that because "their" (singular "they") is
becoming more common. I would suggest
that in an academic context you would
still stick to "his or her" as much as
possible.
This would be better because it is
just a little bit more formal and it
follows the traditional rules of grammar.