The Grammar of Predicate Pronouns

When Mary phones her friend John using a new number, John naturally asks, “Who’s this?” To this Mary instinctively responds, “It’s me, Mary.”

Together with Mary at the cafeteria, John notices a group of students waving at them. It’s the peers. John tells Mary, “It’s them.”

At the coffeeshop waiting for their order, the crew member yells, “order number 49, order number 49.” Mary alerts John, “That’s us.”

These are instinctive expressions. Spontaneous they are, no-brainer to explore. In English grammar, however, there’s one rule that we can draw to standardize these utterances, one that’s tapped (if ever so) to conform with formal circumstances—the grammar of predicate pronouns. Let’s bring this to our Grammar Lab and see about what these pronouns are and how they come out in English expressions.

A predicate pronoun is a word found after the verb in a sentence. This pronoun substitutes for a noun functioning as the subject of the sentence. As a component of the predicate, such a pronoun denotes the same referent as that of the subject, by which the predicate pronoun refers back to the subject. Simply put, the subject and the predicate pronoun refer to the same thing. In “The winner is he,” “he” is the predicate pronoun pertaining to the subject “winner,” by which the subject and the predicate pronoun refer to the same person.

Predicate pronouns pop up in sentences whose main verb is a linking verb “be.” In particular, these are sentences with “am,” “is,” “are,” “was,” or “were” as verb, where the predicate pronoun functions as subject complement.

The grammar of predicate pronouns is easy as pie. Just one rule, indeed. A predicate pronoun comes in the subjective form. In other words, how you write a pronoun as the subject of a sentence is how you write a predicate pronoun—“I,” “he,” “she,” “they.”

Why do predicate pronouns come in subjective form when they belong in the predicate? Looking at the occurrences of these words in sentences, we can see that predicate pronouns give another term to refer to the subject. Specifically, such a pronoun is a restatement of the subject but using another term, in this case, a pronoun. In fact, we can exchange the positions of the subject and the predicate pronoun in the sentence without causing any change in the thought of the sentence. In “Your attending physician is she,” we can flip the subject “Your attending physician” and the predicate pronoun “she” whilst making not a movement in meaning, “She is your attending physician.”

Predicate pronouns are just one of the English constructions that recede from usual, day-to-day language. It involves only one grammar rule—shaping the pronoun into the subjective form. Though you may not feel conforming with it as you speak to your friend, the waiter, or folks (such as “Oh, it’s him”), knowledge of this grammar helps you get along in formal milieu, be it in speaking or writing, where standard grammar is the norm. At the end of the day, whatever the people’s choice is, that’s up to them—it’s they who decide.