Pronoun - The Views of Different Schools

The Views of Different Schools

Pronouns have been classified as one of the parts of speech since at least the 2nd century BC when they were included in the Greek treatise Art of Grammar. Objections to this approach have appeared among grammatical theories in the 20th century. Their grammatical heterogeneity, many-sided pronouns were underlined, which were classified as follows:

• "indicative words" (Karl Brugmann, Karl Bühler, Uriel Weinreich);
• "indexes" or "indicators" (Charles Sanders Peirce, William Edward Collinson);
• "words with changeable signification" (Adolf Noreen);
• "moveable identifiers" (Otto Jespersen, Roman Jakobson);
• "updating" or "means of transferring from language to speech" (Charles Bally, Émile Benveniste);
• "words of subjective-objective lexical meaning" (Alexey Peshkovsky);
• "word remnants" or "substitutes" (Lev Shcherba, Leonard Bloomfield, Zellig Harris);
• "determiners whose NP complements have been deleted" (Paul Postal);
• "represents" (Ferdinand Brunot);
• "survivals of a special part of speech" (Viktor Vinogradov),