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779

ouse is ours, and that is _yours; theirs_ is more commodious than _ours_"--_Ib._, p. 40. Thus all his personal pronouns of the possessive case, he then made to be inflections of pronouns of _a different class!_ What are they now? Seek the answer under the head of that gross solecism, "Adjective Pronouns." You may find it in one half of our English grammars.

OBS. 8.--Any considerable error in the classing of words, does not stand alone; it naturally brings others in its train. Murray's "Adjective Pronouns," (which he now subdivides into four little classes, _possessive, distributive, demonstrative_, and indefinite,) being all of them misnamed and misplaced in his etymology, have led both him and many others into strange errors in syntax. The possessives only are "pronouns;" and these are pronouns of the possessive case. As such, they agree with the antecedent nouns for which they stand, in _person, number_, and _gender_; and are governed, like all other possessives, by the nouns which follow them. The rest are not pronouns, but pronominal _adjectives_; and, as such, they relate to nouns expressed or understood after them. Accordingly, they have none of the above-mentioned qualities, except that the words this and that form the plurals these and those. Or, if we choose to ascribe to a pronominal adjective all the properties of the noun understood, it is merely for the sake of brevity in parsing. The difference, then, between a "pronominal adjective" and an "adjective pronoun," should seem to be this; that the one is an adjective, and the other _a pronoun_: it is like the difference between a horserace and a racehorse. What can be hoped from the grammarian who cannot discern it? And what can be made of rules and examples like the following? "Adjective pronouns must agree, in number, with _their substantives_: as, 'This book, these books;  < previous  next >