What is a pronoun? | The parts of speech | Grammar | Khan Academy Video Lecture | Complete Course on English Grammar: Upgrade your Speaking & Listening - Personal Skills

- [Voiceover] Hello grammarians.
We're going to start talking
about pronouns today,
and of course that
begins with the question,
What are pronouns?
Allow me to answer that question
by way of a demonstration.
Emma laughed so hard, milk
came out of Emma's nose.
Zach lifted the log.
Zach found a worm under the log.
So, these sentences don't have pronouns,
but what they do have is repeated nouns.
Here we have Emma and
then we say Emma's again,
and then we say Zach and the log,
and then we say Zach and the log.
But, people are smart, right?
We have relatively long attention spans,
and so if we start off a
sentence talking about Emma,
and we're pretty sure that
we're still talking about Emma,
we don't need to say that name twice.
We don't need to say
Emma and then Emma again.
So, what a pronoun does is it allows you
to take out the unnecessary noun
when we're very certain we
know what we're talking about.
So you don't have to say
Emma a million times,
you can replace Emma with her.
Same thing applies to
the second two sentences.
We don't have to keep on
mentioning Zach and the log
when we know what we're talking about.
So the first sentence would still read
Zach lifted the log,
but then in the second sentence
we can replace the name Zach,
since we already know
who we're talking about,
with the word he, and we can
replace this little phrase,
the log, with it, since we know
we're talking about the log.
Now, words like her and he
and it are all pronouns.
So, what are pronouns?
They are words that
stand in for other words.
Now, obviously, her, he, and it
are not the only pronouns in English,
but for now I just want
you to think about the idea
that a pronoun is a word that
stands in for another word.
You can learn anything.
David out.