On So‐Called “Pronouns” in English, 1966

Postal's proposal can be broken down into three main components. The first is that what we call pronouns are not in fact a subtype of noun. The second is that pronouns are a subtype of determiner, closely related to definite articles. The third is that pronouns, though not themselves nouns, are followed by a noun that is usually not pronounced. This chapter provides informal discussion of certain regularities in the syntactic behavior of forms traditionally called ‘pronouns’ in discussions of English syntax. In a transformational grammar, each sentence and hence, derivatively, each part of each sentence has two distinct syntactic structures as part of its overall grammatical description; a highly abstract Deep structure relevant for semantic interpretation and a Surface structure relevant for phonetic interpretation. These two aspects of syntactic form are in general connected by a long and complex chain of transformational rules which, furthermore, derive a sequence of intermediate forms.