EXPLANATION Most people select the right pronoun to use in sentences most of the time without thinking about it but even some competent English users sometimes get mixed up. This section is designed to help you to sort out the tricky cases - and it really is quite easy.
The example above (using I instead of me) illustrates the most common problem. No one would say She handed the prize to I, yet as soon as the word 'and' is inserted, people become confused. Say the following sentences to yourself:
- She handed the prizes to me.
- She handed the prizes to Tom and me.
- She handed the prizes to Tom and Brooke and Taylor and me.
Once we recognise that the pronoun occurs in a phrase beginning with the preposition to, it is obvious that we need to use me (to ... me). The pronoun me is also used after verbs: Take me to your leader. In that sentence, me comes after the verb take. While no one would say, 'Take I to your leader,' some might fall into the trap of saying 'Take Spock and I to your leader'! Of course, it should be 'Take Spock and me to your leader.' The confusion happens when a pronoun follows 'and'.
Those examples indicate what happens when personal pronouns are placed as the objects of verbs or prepositions. Now let us look at the use of pronouns in the subject of a sentence. Say the following sentences to yourself:
- She went to the movies.
- She and Amy went to the movies.
Some people might be tempted to use Her in the second sentence and say Amy and her went to the movies. However, the same people, quite rightly, would never say Her...went to the movies. Again, it is the use of ‘and’ that again throws people.
Thus, whether we select the correct personal pronoun to insert in a sentence depends on how clearly we understand its function in the sentence. We choose a different pronoun according to whether it is the subject, the object of a verb or preposition or whether it is a possessive pronoun - and it is a very small family of pronouns, as shown in the table below.
| Subject | Object | Possessive |
|---|---|---|
| I | me | mine |
| we | us | ours |
| you | you | yours |
| she | her | hers |
| he | him | his |
| they | them | theirs |
| it | it | its |
| who | whom | whose |
As you can see, the pronouns change according to their function. We call these three functions the case of the pronoun... so the choice of pronoun depends on whether we need a subject (subjective case, also called nominative case), an object (objective case) or a possessive pronoun (possessive case).
In many European languages, case affects nouns as well as pronouns, so they have to change slightly according to their function, their case. Aren’t you glad that you are learning English where only the above pronouns change according to case!