Grammar Tips: Pronoun Case
Pronouns are words that stand in for nouns—he, she, they, him, her, them, etc. Depending on whether the pronoun is acting as a subject (performing the action in the sentence) or an object (the action is being performed to it) the pronoun will either take the subjective or objective case.
For example, in the sentence “Rick gave the book to Maria,” Rick is the subject because he performs the action of giving the book, whereas Maria is the object because she receives the action by being given the book. If we were to replace Rick and Maria with masculine and feminine pronouns, we would use the subjective “HE” to replace Rick and the objective “HER” to replace Maria. The sentence would then be “He gave the book to her.”
Here is a chart to help you remember pronoun case of some common pronouns.
| Subjective | Objective | Possessive |
| I | me | my |
| you | you | your |
| he, she | his, her | his, her |
| we | us | our |
| they | them | their |
This rule helps to explain the trick we taught you yesterday (about selecting the proper pronoun in compound noun forms). If you are a native English speaker, your ear recognizes the correct pronoun by sound, whereas if you are a non-native English speaker, you will need to memorize this chart to learn the appropriate case.
