Page 139 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

More on the Noun Phrase:Pronouns
OVERVIEW
• The place of personal pronouns in academic text and their associ- ated genres.
• Uses of impersonal pronouns.
• Demonstratives, text cohesion, and lexical substitution.
• The prevalence of indefinite pronouns and learning to avoid them.
Although the term pronouns suggests that they can be used in place of nouns, in reality pronouns have characteristics and functions that make them different in important ways. First, unlike nouns, pronouns represent a closed class of words (Quirk et al., 1985)—that is, they are limited in number and functions, and new words of this type are not coined. Unlike nouns, pronouns can be used in place of whole phrases or concepts with nominal functions (e.g., the phrase the big blue grammar books can be re- placed by a pronoun they, which refers to the entire noun phrase). Further- more, in English pronouns have syntactic properties that nouns do not have: Pronoun forms can vary depending on whether they occur in the sentence subject or object position (I/me, she/her) or refer to first, second, or third person, or male or female.
In addition to personal pronouns, various other types of pronouns are very common in English: demonstrative (this/that, these/those), indefinite (somebody, anybody, everything), and slot fillers (it/there). Although many L2 learners believe pronouns to be syntactically and lexically simple, and al- though words or particles with demonstrative and indefinite functions exist in most languages, various types of problems in pronoun use have been identified in NNS students' academic prose (Indrasuta, 1988; Johns, 1991,
1997; V aughan, 1991).
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