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I was explaining it's vs. its to someone the other day, and I said "None of the pronouns (his, hers, theirs, yours, its, whose, ...) has an apostrophe." Later I got to wondering whether that was really true, and sure enough fairly quickly found one that does: one's, as in "One's memory isn't what it used to be."

Are there other pronouns that use an apostrophe?

RegDwigнt
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T.J. Crowder
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3 Answers3

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Everybody's, everyone's, somebody's, someone's, anybody's, anyone's, nobody's, no one's.

EDIT:

And also the reciprocal pronouns: each other's, one another's.

Barrie England
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  • +1, and the informal y'all's from wiki; btw, these pronouns are not considered personal or are they? – Unreason Dec 15 '11 at 09:16
  • Ah! Of course, I should have got there. :-) – T.J. Crowder Dec 15 '11 at 09:38
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    @Unreason: No, they're indefinite pronouns. – Barrie England Dec 15 '11 at 09:49
  • It's the one or body at the end that requires the apostrophe; they're still nouns, though they're only hanging on by a thread. The first part of these compounds (some, every, any) are just quantifiers. Latin used to do similar things with quisquis and quoque. General rule: whatever part gets the genitive stuck on it determines the apostrophiliation. – John Lawler Dec 15 '11 at 16:03
  • @JohnLawler: Very good point. (Mind you, pronouns are nouns as well; did you mean they're still common nouns? I'm not up on my noun terminology -- get me past pronoun and proper noun and I start to wobble a bit.) – T.J. Crowder Dec 15 '11 at 16:20
  • No, pronouns are not nouns. They're a different category altogether, with different morphology for some, and vastly different syntax for all. Like nouns, pronouns can *Refer*, and can form Noun Phrases, but they're not the same thing at all in English. Pronouns, for one thing, are a closed set, while nouns are an open set; you can list all English pronouns on one page, and they'll be the same set in ten years. Try that with nouns. – John Lawler Dec 15 '11 at 19:44
  • @JohnLawler: Not all linguists would agree: ‘[Pronouns] occur as head of NPs functioning in the main NP positions of subject, object, predicative complement, complement of a preposition. They form a subclass of nouns rather than being a separate category.’ (Huddleston and Pullum) ‘ . . . we take the fact that pronouns can act as the Heads of phrases that can function as Subject, Direct Object, Predicative Complement, and so on, as a sufficiently weighty reason for regarding them as nouns.’ (Bas Aarts) – Barrie England Dec 15 '11 at 19:59
  • True. "Not all linguists" is the number that usually agree on anything. Though H&P don't, McCawley differentiates them. It doesn't really matter unless the theory makes some special claim for a category hierarchy. – John Lawler Dec 15 '11 at 20:02
  • Wow, I always thought pronouns were a class of nouns. In general not all scholars of any subject can agree on nearly anything. :-) What would each you say the consensus was, though? @John, I think you've clearly said "not nouns." Barrie? – T.J. Crowder Dec 16 '11 at 13:59
  • @T.J.Crowder: The problem is that they share only some, and not all, of the features of nouns. I've seen no persuasive argument for keeping them entirely separate and because of the way they behave in sentences I'd say there were a sub-class of nouns. – Barrie England Dec 16 '11 at 14:58
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    Grammatical classes, like noun, verb, and pronoun, are just convenient groupings with similar properties, like subatomic particles, and -- since linguistics doesn't involve numbers like quantum mechanics does, and therefore can't calculate values -- they're mostly just traditional. (Though they do change, slowly; Latin had eight traditional "Parts of Speech", and so does English. But not the same eight.) – John Lawler Dec 16 '11 at 16:27
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The condensation of prose by dropping apostrophes and hyphens works at both local and global scales. "Stopsign" began as "stop sign" thence 'stop-sign". "Right of way" remains standard for the property right incident real estate), except "right-of-way" when used to denote a patch of ground. Similarly, the myth than Twain said or wrote "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes." stems from a passage in the preface to "The Gilded Age: A Story of To-Day" (2nd Ed). Such changes amble along with the lingo, and the less we see of words sporting the dispensible the less we care for them in general.

Yet the rate of typographic attrition also has an idiosyncratic component. The apostrophe in "van der Waals' force" was hastily dropped because it was being used so much and so often. (The gloss of the Nobel committee is somewhat vague: in paraphrase, "for making vast domains of science possible".) The notation for molecular structure in chemical physics where the force matters a lot involves apostrophes, which leads to a sometimes amusing mishmash of grams and grammar. (The hyphen in "mish-mash" survives in Bulgarian cuisine. Dr. Johnson called it "a low word", and that's the perhaps low-down lowdown.)

Lewis Goudy
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    A lot of good points, but you don't give any pronouns (to answer the question). This would be better suited as a comment or an answer to a related question where your research and contributions are most welcome. – livresque Oct 03 '20 at 02:33
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I taught English for twenty-eight years, and I think that the confusion is that none of the possessive pronouns use apostrophes. This is confusing because possessive nouns use apostrophes. The pronouns mentioned, such as everyone's, etc., are indefinite pronouns--not possessives.

Lynette Kronick
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