October 13, 2017 Friday
Bedtime Story
Reflexive Pronouns and Reciprocal Pronouns
Let us see how we use reflexive pronouns.
Consider this simple sentence:
I wounded myself.
Note here that what I mean to say is not
only am I wounded but I am indicating that the fault was mine and mine alone.
The pronoun myself is tagged with another
pronoun I and it is bounded to something specific.
The ambiguity is waved off.
The significance of “myself” in clearing
away any kind of ambiguity becomes clearer if you compare the two sentences
below.
Sentence 1: He dropped the heavy bag on his
feet and injured his feet.
Sentence 2: He dropped the heavy bag on his
feet and injured himself.
In the first sentence, because of a lack of
reflexive pronoun, the word “–his” is a free variable and can apply to the
person carrying the bag in first instance and to some other person in the
second instance.
Most will assume that the second “his” in
sentence 1 refers to the same person who the first “his” is referring to but
that is an assumption and may not necessarily be true.
The two “his” are contextual and thus are
free variables in the first sentence.
But in the second sentence, that single
word ‘himself’ makes it very clear that the person who suffered the injury is
the same one as the one carrying the heavy bag.
Thus reflexive pronouns from their property
of being bounded take out the ambiguity from pronouns.
Now let us move away from reflexive pronouns
and consider reciprocal pronouns.
Reciprocal pronouns are those pronouns that
refer to a noun phrase mentioned previously in a sentence.
Do not get intimidated by the term noun
phrase.
Noun phrase is probably the most frequent
type of phrase that you will come across in any language consisting of a noun
or a pronoun as its head word.
The sentence - The school bus is yellow in
color – contains two noun phrases, ‘The School bus’ and ‘yellow in color’.
So there is nothing serious about the term
noun phrase.
Reciprocal pronouns in English language are
– ‘one another’ and ‘each other’.
Like reflexive pronouns, the reciprocal
pronouns typically refer back to the subject of the sentence.
A simple example of reciprocal pronoun
would be:
Lisa and Mary liked each other.
We shall discuss reciprocal pronouns from
the point of bounded variables in the nights to come.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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