Pro-form

A pro-form is a function word that substitutes a word, phrase, clause, or sentence whose meaning is recoverable from the context, and it is used to avoid redundant expressions. A pro-form is also used for the item questioned in a question, and such a pro-form is called an interrogative pro-form.

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Pro-forms are divided into several categories according to which part of speech they substitute:

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• A pronoun substitutes a noun or a noun phrase with or without a determiner.
• A pro-adjective substitutes an adjective or a phrase functioning as an adjective.
• A pro-adverb substitutes an adverb or a phrase functioning as an adverb.
• A pro-verb substitutes a verb or a verb phrase.
• A pro-sentence substitutes an entire sentence or subsentence.

L. L. Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto, called a table of systematic interrogative, demonstrative, and quantifier pro-forms and determiners in a language a table of correlatives. The table of correlatives for English follows. Note that while some categories are highly irregular, others (like quantifiers) are not.

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Some languages may have more categories. For example, while English demonstratives only distinguish proximal (close to the speaker, e.g. this, here) and distal (far from the speaker, e.g. that, there), Japanese makes a three-way distinction between proximal (close to the speaker, e.g. kore, koko), medial (close to the addressee, e.g. sore, soko), and distal (far from both, e.g. are, asoko). Early Modern English made a similar distinction between this/here, that/there, and yon/yonder. Spanish, as well as other Romance languages, shows this same three-way distinction, dating back to Latin.

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One of the most salient features of modern Indo-European languages is that relative pro-forms and interrogative pro-forms, as well as demonstrative pro-forms in some languages, have identical forms. Consider the two different functions of who in "Who's the criminal who did this?" or the meanings of that in "That's the man that you saw back home."

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Most other language families don't have this ambiguity, nor do several ancient Indo-European languages. For example, both Latin and ancient Greek distinguish the relative pro-forms from the interrogative pro-forms.

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Pro-form: See also ►



 

Function word: Function words are words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning, but instead serve to express grammatical relationships with other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker. Words which are not function words are called content words or lexical word...

L. L. Zamenhof: Dr. Ludovic Lazarus (Ludwik Lejzer) Zamenhof (December 15, 1859–April 14, 1917) was an ophthalmologist, philologist, and the initiator of Esperanto, the most widely spoken planned language to date. His native languages were Russian and Yiddish, but he also spoke Polish and German fluently. Lat...

Esperanto: Esperanto is the most widely spoken constructed international language. The name derives from D-ro Esperanto (Dr. Hopeful), the pseudonym under which L. L. Zamenhof first published the language in 1887. Zamenhof's goal was to create an easy-to-learn and flexible language as a universal second langua...




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