Noun groups

We haven’t talked about pronouns, and we probably should.

Let’s get some tricky labelling out of the way:

• A noun is a word that represents a thing: cat, tripod, flower, harpoon.
• A noun group is a group of words that represent a thing in more detail: that flowery tripod-legged cat with the harpoon.
• A pronoun is a word that ‘stands in’ for a noun group: I, it, those, you, me, them.

For example: I am that flowery tripod-legged cat with the harpoon.

‘Pro’ means ‘for’ or ‘on behalf of’—so a pronoun is a word standing in on behalf of a noun group that’s already been introduced.

Pronouns aren’t usually part of a noun group because they don’t have pointers, quantifiers, describers, classifiers, etc. The whole point of a pronoun is that you can bundle all that detail up into a simple stand-in word like ‘she’.

So noun groups and pronouns are distinct.

Pronouns and noun groups work together like this:

The pronoun ‘them’ stands in for ‘the ewe and the dog’.

Pronouns are extremely important and useful. They are essential for what’s called cohesion—creating writing that hangs together.

But from a Writelike point of view, unless we are specifically talking about cohesion, highlighting noun groups and pronouns separately can become confusing.

This is because in many Writelike activities noun groups and pronouns are interchangeable so long as the snippet still makes sense.

For example, are any of these wrong?

In all of these examples, we’ve treated noun groups and pronouns as interchangeable, and as far as you can tell, the snippets still make sense.

For that reason, unless we really need to separate them, we will usually highlight both noun groups and pronouns like this:

So what you need to remember from this is:

• Nouns are words that refer to things.
• Noun groups represent things in more detail.
• Pronouns are words that stand in for nouns that have been introduced earlier.
• Noun groups and pronouns work together to create cohesion, the way in which writing hangs together. 
• In many Writelike activities they are interchangeable, so we will highlight both of them as noun groups even though that isn’t technically correct.
• We will no doubt have lessons where it’s important to distinguish between noun groups and pronouns, but this is not one of those lessons.