A disjunctive pronoun is a stressed form of a pronoun reserved for use in isolation or in certain syntactic contexts. In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a pro-form that substitutes for a noun phrase. ...

Examples and usage

Disjunctive pronominal forms are typically found in the following environments. The examples are taken from French (and the English translations show similar properties): The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ...

• in syntactically unintegrated disjunct (or "dislocated") positions

Les autres s'en vont, mais moi, je reste. "The others are leaving, but me, I'm staying."

• in elliptical constructions ("sentence fragments") with no verb (e.g. short answers)

Qui veut du gâteau ? Moi. "Who wants cake? Me."

Il est plus âgé que moi. "He is older than me."

• in a coordination with a noun phrase or another pronoun

Mes parents et moi arrivons dans une heure. "Me and my parents are arriving in an hour."

• in the main clause of a cleft sentence

C'est moi que vous cherchez. "It's me that you're looking for."

• after a preposition.

Comptez sur moi. "Count on me."

Disjunctive pronouns are often semantically restricted. For example, in a language with grammatical gender, there may be a tendency to use masculine and feminine disjunctive pronouns primarily for referring to animate entities. In linguistics, a disjunct is a type of adverbial that expresses information that is not considered essential to the sentence it appears in, but which is considered to be the speakers or writers attittude towards the propositional content of the sentence. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Ellipsis. ... In linguistics, a coordination is a complex syntactic structure that links together two or more elements, known as conjuncts. ... A cleft sentence is a sentence formed by a main clause and a subordinate clause, which together express a meaning that could be shown using a simple sentence, but focusing on a particular constituent. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with adposition. ... In linguistics, grammatical gender is a morphological category associated with the expression of gender through inflection or agreement. ... Animacy is a grammatical category, usually of nouns, which influences the form a verb takes when it is associated with that noun. ...

Si l'on propose une bonne candidate, je voterai pour elle. "If someone proposes a good candidate, I'll vote for her."

Si l'on propose une bonne loi, *je voterai pour elle. "If someone proposes a good law, I'll vote for her (it)."

"It's me"

Main article: It's I/It's me

In some languages, a personal pronoun has a form called a disjunctive pronoun, which is used when it stands on its own, or with only a copula, such as in answering to the question "Who wrote this page?" The natural answer for most English speakers in this context would be "me" (or "It's me"), parallel to moi (or C'est moi) in French. Unlike in French, however, where such constructions are considered standard, English pronouns used in this way have caused dispute. Some grammarians have argued and persuaded some educators that the correct answer should be "I" or "It is I" because "is" is a linking verb and "I" is a predicate nominative, and up until a few centuries ago spoken English used pronouns in the subjective case in such sentences. However, since English has lost noun inflection and now relies on word order, using the accusative me after the verb be like other verbs seems very natural to modern speakers. The phrase "It is I" historically came from the Middle English "It am I" and the change from "am" to "is" was also a step towards fixing the SVO word order. It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into subject complement. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... In linguistics, a copula is a word that is used to link the subject of a sentence with a predicate (a subject complement or an adverbial). ... The subjective case is the term preferred by English grammarians for the nominative case. ... In linguistics, declension is the inflection of nouns, pronouns and adjectives to indicate such features as number (typically singular vs. ... The accusative case (abbreviated ACC) of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. ... Middle English is the name given by historical linguistics to the diverse forms of the English language spoken between the Norman invasion of 1066 and the mid-to-late 15th century, when the Chancery Standard, a form of London-based English, began to become widespread, a process aided by the... In linguistic typology, subject-verb-object (SVO) is the sequence subject verb object in neutral expressions: Sam ate oranges. ...

References

• Cardinaletti, Anna; Michal Starke (1999). "The typology of structural deficiency: A case study of the three classes of pronouns", in Henk van Riemsdijk (ed.): Clitics in the Languages of Europe. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 145–233. 

See also

• Irish morphology
• English personal pronouns
• French personal pronouns

This linguistics article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.