Skip to content | Skip to institutional links

Common menu bar links

THIS EMPTY H2 IS TO CORRECT AN ERROR FOR THE H3 IN THE POPUP WINDOW

Share this page

If you wish to recommend or share this page by e-mail*, social bookmarking or social networking, click on the icon of your choice:

Access to the proposed sites is free, but you must have a user account. Access to these sites may vary depending on your browser (for example, Internet Explorer 6 does not support all the sites). You must make sure that your browser is up to date. In addition, depending on which sharing method you have chosen, some characters (accented letters, apostrophes or other symbols) in the title of the page you are recommending may be displayed incorrectly or missing. You will need to make these corrections yourself before recommending the page to your contacts.

*No e-mail or personal information will be retained. For more information on privacy policies and practices that apply to the Language Portal of Canada, see the Government of Canada Privacy Statement.

Social bookmarking

Social bookmarking allows you to save your favourite links on the Internet through social bookmarking sites such as Google Bookmarks or Reddit. These sites offer many advantages. You can:

access your favourite links from any computer or mobile device connected to the Internet;
search your favourite links easily using the keywords (commonly called "tags") you assign to each link;
share your favourite links with an Internet community;
discover the favourite links of other Web users who share your interests.

Social bookmarking sites are usually free, but you must subscribe to use them. Social bookmarking is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification and social indexing.

Social networking

Social networking sites, such as Facebook and Linkedln, are Internet platforms that allow you to interact online and create interconnected Web communities. You can create personal profiles, establish lists of users with whom you have a common connection or establish new relationships.

To exchange ideas with other members, you can post messages to your personal page, send e-mails and instant messages or share files.

Comments

Please do not hesitate to contact us at noslangues.ourlanguages@tpsgc-pwgsc.gc.ca if you have any comments or suggestions about this feature.

Parts of Speech: Personal Pronouns

Pronouns are words that take the place of a noun. Pronouns can do anything that a noun can do. For example, they can be subjects or objects of a verb.

There are many different types of pronouns. This article focusses on personal pronouns.

What are personal pronouns?

The personal pronouns are I, we, you, he, she, it and they. These pronouns refer to someone or something specific:

I and we refer to the persons speaking or writing (first person).
You refers to the persons receiving the message (second person).
He, she, it and they refer to persons or things being discussed (third person).

We often use a third person pronoun to avoid repeating a noun that has already been mentioned. Here's an example:

Jason went to the mall. He bought a new CD for Julie. She really enjoyed it.

In this example, he means Jason, she means Julie,and it means CD. Personal pronouns are handy words; they make our conversations and our writing much less repetitious.

Do personal pronouns have different forms?

Yes, they do. This is an important difference between personal pronouns and nouns. Whether a noun is a subject or an object, its form doesn't change:

Claude went skiing.
(Claude is subject of the verb went.)

Marianne helped Claude up the hill.
(Claude is object of the verb helped.)

In the above examples, the noun Claude remains the same whether it acts as a subject or an object. But if we use the personal pronoun he instead of Claude, the pronoun will change to him in the second example below:

He went skiing.
(He is subject of the verb went.)

Marianne helped him up the hill.
(Him is object of the verb helped.)

What are the different forms for personal pronouns?

The table below shows the subject, object and possessive forms for these pronouns.

Subject	Object	Possessive
Used for subjects or subject complements	Used for objects of verbs or prepositions	Used to show ownership
I	me	mine
you	you	yours
he	him	his
she	her	hers
it	it	its
we	us	ours
they	them	theirs

Text description of this table is available on a separate page.

THIS EMPTY H2 IS FOR AN ERROR FOUND WITHIN THE H3 IN THE POPUP WINDOW