ABSTRACT
The personal pronouns are some of the most frequent words in English and on the surface seem to be quite straightforward to use. They also exhibit some grammatical categories which are not found elsewhere in English. The words 'you, we, they' are mainly the subjective pronouns, but the related forms; objective, possessive determiner and possessive pronoun follow the same pattern of usage. In order to give more widespread coverage, two words which are not the subjective forms are included: her and myself. The normal way of summing up the personal pronouns is by means of a table which shows the relationships between the different forms: the so-called 'personal pronoun paradigm'. This involves a number of factors, namely person, number, case and gender. We, you and they can all have generic reference; that is, they can all refer to people in general, as well as to specific groups that are known to both speaker and hearer.
