Personal pronouns are an important part of speech as they refer to subjects without naming them. Their use avoids redundancy in sentences without sacrificing coherence in speech, so they are a very useful element for writing that children should know. Mastering personal pronouns and learning to identify them will not only help them to write without so many repetitions, but also to better understand the texts that use them.

To help you in the task of familiarizing children with personal pronouns, we explain what they are, what their main classification is, what functions they perform, and we offer you some examples that may be useful for children to understand them. Hotels in Jávea to go with children.

What exactly are personal pronouns?

Personal pronouns are a grammatical resource that allows us to designate the participants of a discourse, whether they are people, animals or objects. Its main function is to refer to these elements without the need to name them, designating a grammatical person, their number and sometimes their gender.

It is worth noting that by themselves, personal pronouns do not have a specific meaning, but it varies depending on the situation and the context. The choice of one type of pronoun or another is determined by the function that the element it replaces plays in the sentence.

The main types of personal pronouns

Personal pronouns are mainly classified into two categories: stressed and unstressed personal pronouns.

1. Stressed personal pronouns

Stressed personal pronouns are those that have a prosodic accent, that is, they are pronounced with more emphasis regardless of whether or not they have an accent mark. In general, the tonic forms can act as a subject, attribute or prepositional term and can appear in different parts of the sentence, either isolated, without a verb or after a proposition.

This type of personal pronoun has gender variation and must always agree in gender and number with the verb. Except for the third person singular, “it”, which is considered a neuter pronoun.

2. Unstressed personal pronouns

Unstressed personal pronouns do not have a prosodic accent, that is, they are not pronounced with greater emphasis. They are usually accompanied by a verb form, either before the verb in the case of clitic pronouns or after the verb in the case of proclitic pronouns.

Usually when they appear after the verb, they join it to form a single word as in the case of “listen to me” or “ask him”. They usually function as a non-prepositional verbal complement or are part of pronominal verbs.

Taking into account the grammatical person, personal pronouns can be classified into: first person pronouns, second person pronouns and third person pronouns.

1. First person pronouns

Refers to a single person or group. The pronouns that are part of this category are: “I”, “me”, “my”, “with me” in the singular and “we”, “us” and “us” in the plural.

2. Second person pronouns

Refers to the caller. The pronouns included in this category are: “you”, “usted”, “you”, “you”, “with you”, “vos” in the singular and “vosotros”, “ustedes”, “vosotras” and “ you” in the plural.

3. Third person pronouns

It refers to a third person, different from the speaker and the interlocutor. Within this category the pronouns are included: “he”, “it”, “him”, “it”, “yes”, “with it”, “it”, “it”, “she”, “the”, in the case of the singular and “they”, “they”, “the”, “las”, “them”, “se”, “sí” and “consigo” in the plural.

The syntactic functions of personal pronouns

When replacing a noun or nominal group, personal pronouns can fulfill different functions within a sentence, which usually coincide with those of the element they replace.

1. Subject

When personal pronouns serve as the subject of a sentence, they refer to the author of the action of the verb. They can also fulfill the attribute function together with a linking verb. In these cases, the personal pronoun agrees in number and person with the verb and, as a general rule, it is omitted since the conjugated form of the verb is enough to indicate which person it is, as for example in the sentence “I can go tomorrow to the party” the pronoun “I” is omitted, “I can go to the party tomorrow”.

Subject pronouns include: “I”, “you”, “you”, “he”, “she”, “you”, “we”, “we”, “you”, “vosotras”, “they”. ”, “them” and “you”.

Some examples are:

• “He has gone to visit his mother.”
• “We will go tomorrow afternoon.”
• “They always look for the best option.”

2. Direct complement

Another of the functions that personal pronouns can perform is that of direct object, in which case they complement the action of the verb. Obviously, in these cases, the personal pronouns are accompanied by a verb and replace a noun.

The direct object pronouns include: “te”, “lo”, “la”, “nos”, “os”, “los” and “las”. Some examples of pronouns as a direct object are:

• “Have you heard?”
• “They are very fond of us.”
• “They will change them when the summer season is over.”

3. Indirect object

Personal pronouns can also function as an indirect object, designating the recipient of the action described by the verb. In these cases, they are accompanied by a verb, whose indirect object will be.

Among the pronouns that function as an indirect object are: “me”, “te”, “le”, “nos”, “os” and “les”. In the case of “le” and “les” it can be converted into “se” to avoid cacophony. Here are some examples of personal pronouns performing the indirect object function:

• “There was a knock on my door this morning very early.”
• “I’m going to tell you a story.”
• “Tell him I’m not going to school tomorrow.”

4. Prepositional use

Another function of personal pronouns is prepositional. In these cases, they are located after a preposition . It is worth noting that in the case of the prepositions “between” and “according to” the prepositional pronouns “me” and “you” are not used, but the subject pronouns “me” and “you”, such as “Between you and me, I don’t feel like going to school” or “According to you, I shouldn’t go to school”.

Within the prepositional pronouns are: “me”, “you”, “you”, “he”, “she”, “you”, “it”, “yes”, “we”, “we”, “you”. ”, “you”, “them”, “them” and “you”. Here are some examples that may be useful to you:

• “Don’t go yet.”
• “The gift is for her.”
• “They will go with you to the park.”