The Peculiar English Pronoun ‘I’

Abstract

The personal pronoun ‘I’ exhibits some uniqueness in English syntax, morphology and to some extent semantics in sociolinguistic usage. Interestingly, in many languages of the world, there is a near universality of its morphological form or its variants in occurrence.  This paper explores this peculiarity as evident in morphological variation and syntactic deviation and shows that it poses pedagogical implications in the teaching and learning of this personal pronoun. It accounts for concord problems in constructions involving this pronoun. Suggestions are made for its handling in the classroom.

Key words.The first person pronoun, morphological variation, syntactic deviation, sociolinguistic usage, universality of orthographic shape and pedagogical implication