🗣️ 4. Pronouns

Latin has no article. Its pronouns do the work that articles, possessives, demonstratives and relatives do in English, and a Latin pronoun often stands for a whole noun phrase that English would repeat. The classes are: personal, reflexive, possessive, demonstrative, intensive, relative, interrogative and indefinite (Bennett 1918 §§82–92). The subject pronoun is usually not expressed, because the verb ending carries the person (§6).

Contents

1. Personal and reflexive pronouns
2. Possessives
3. Demonstratives
4. The intensive ipse and the identity pronoun īdem
5. The relative and the interrogative
6. Indefinites and negatives
7. Correlatives
8. Use: the third person, the reflexive, the relative
9. How Mova handles it

1. Personal and reflexive pronouns

Two genitives of the plural: nostrī, vestrī are the objective genitives (memor nostrī, "mindful of us"), and nostrum, vestrum the partitive (and the old plural of the possessive): quem nostrum ignorare arbitraris?, "which of us do you think does not know?" (Cic. Cat. 1.1). The pronouns have no third person; in its place the demonstratives is, ea, id, ille and hic are used, and for the reflexive third person sē. The enclitic -cum stands after the ablative: mēcum, tēcum, sēcum, nōbīscum (tecum, in Cic. Cat. 1.9, quos tecum educeres, "whom to take out with you").

The nominative forms ego and tū are used to give emphasis or contrast; in the sentences Ego sum via, et veritas, et vita (John 14:6) and Vos autem, quem me esse dicitis? (Matt 16:15, "but you, whom do you say I am?"), the pronoun is needed to carry the focus. Older mihi often has the final -i short and may be scanned as mĭhĭ; the medieval form michi (chapter 1 §7) is common.

2. Possessives

The possessives are the adjectives meus, tuus, suus (declined like bonus; the voc. sg. m. of meus is mī), and noster, vester (like pulcher); suus is reflexive only. They agree in gender, number and case with the thing owned, not with the owner: patrem suum, "his father" (acc. m. sg.), and filiam suam, suae civitatis (Caes. B. G. 1.3). In the third person the genitive of the demonstrative expresses the non-reflexive possessor: eius "his, her, its" (not suus) and eōrum, eārum "their" (of persons other than the subject).

Caes. B. G. 1.4 · Latin Library … quin ipse sibi mortem consciverit. "… that he himself had brought about his own death." (said of Orgetorix; sibi refers to the subject ipse)

The pronouns ipse and sibi together state the reflexive: ipse sibi, "he for himself".

3. Demonstratives

The three-way contrast is of person: hic is "this one near me, the present one", iste "that one near you" (often with a tone of contempt, iste homo "that fellow"), ille "that one over there" and "that famous one" (Bennett 1918 §§87, 246). Is is weaker and serves as the ordinary third-person pronoun and as the antecedent of the relative: is qui …, "the man who …". The nominative and accusative of the neuter hoc, id, istud, illud and the ablative hoc are frequent. Hic and ille in contrast refer to the nearer and the farther in the text: hic, "the latter", ille, "the former".

In Late and Christian Latin ille, ipse and unus come to do the work of the article, and is declines in frequency; in the Tuscan charters ipsa and ille precede nouns in the manner of the Italian la, il (chapter 15, §4): ipsa casa, la_llct train-s197; et ille alia petia, train-s309.

4. The intensive ipse and the identity pronoun īdem

Ipse, ipsa, ipsum (gen. ipsīus, dat. ipsī; the neuter is ipsum, not ipsud) means "self", for emphasis, and works in all three persons: ego ipse, tū ipse, ipse "he himself". It agrees with the word it emphasises: te ipsum iam esse exiturum (Cic. Cat. 1.9) "that you yourself were about to go out"; ipsorum lingua (Caes. B. G. 1.1) "in their own language"; Omnia per ipsum facta sunt (John 1:3), "all things were made through him", where ipsum is the third-person pronoun.

Īdem, eadem, idem "the same" is is + -dem (acc. eundem, eandem, gen. eiusdem). It is often used for "also, likewise": īdem in apposition adds a second description of the same person (Bennett 1918 §248).

5. The relative and the interrogative

The relative quī, quae, quod (Bennett 1918 §89):

The relative agrees with its antecedent in gender and number and takes its case from its function in its own clause (Bennett 1918 §250). The interrogative quis, quid "who? what?" (substantive) differs from the relative only in the nominative singular masculine/feminine quis and the neuter quid; the adjectival interrogative quī, quae, quod "which?" is declined like the relative:

Matt 16:15 · Clementine Vulgate Dicit illis Jesus: Vos autem, quem me esse dicitis? "Jesus said to them: But you, whom do you say that I am?"

Quem is the interrogative accusative, subject of the infinitive esse with me (chapter 10 §4); dicitis is the main verb.

The relative is the main instrument of subordination in Latin and in English alike. An ethical or connecting relative begins a new sentence and refers back to the preceding one: quae cum ita sint, "and since this is so" (Bennett 1918 §355). A relative with its antecedent forming a unit has also no antecedent in the so-called "headless" use: Ego sum qui sum, "I am who I am" (Ex 3:14), Qui est, misit me ad vos ("He who is has sent me to you"). The interrogative is also used in indirect questions, with the subjunctive (chapter 10).

Quod introduces a clause of its own as a conjunction ("because, that"), and quid is the adverb "why" (accusative of respect); these uses are treated in chapters 7 and 10.

6. Indefinites and negatives

Quis is the weakest of the indefinites and may stand only after sī, nisi, num, nē (Bennett 1918 §252); aliquis is the positive "someone": sī aliquis, nē quis. The rule that quis is ordinarily never the first word of a clause is part of the same logic.

7. Correlatives

The relative, the interrogative and the demonstratives are bound in series of words that begin alike:

Tantus … quantus, tālis … quālis, tot … quot are the vehicles of comparison and of result (ita … ut, tam … ut), described in chapter 10.

8. Use: the third person, the reflexive, the relative

• The subject pronoun is omitted. Dixit is "he said", dixi "I said"; a pronoun is added for emphasis only (Bennett 1918 §242).
• The third person has no pronoun of its own, and is, ille, hic, iste are used according to the distance and the need.
• The reflexive sē and suus refer to the subject of the clause in which they stand. In a subordinate clause that reports the thought of the main subject, they may refer to the main subject — the indirect reflexive (Bennett 1918 §244):

Caes. B. G. 1.3 · Latin Library … ipse suae civitatis imperium obtenturus esset: non esse dubium quin totius Galliae plurimum Helvetii possent; se suis copiis suoque exercitu illis regna conciliaturum confirmat. "… he himself would obtain the rule of his own state; there was no doubt that the Helvetii were the most powerful of all Gaul; he affirmed that he would win kingdoms for them with his own forces and his own army."

Se, suis, suo here refer to Orgetorix, the subject of the sentence that reports his words, not to the Helvetii; illis is "for them". A comparable direct reflexive is Divico's ita Helvetios a maioribus suis institutos esse (Caes. B. G. 1.14), in which suis refers to the accusative subject of the infinitive: "the Helvetii had been taught by their ancestors …".

• The relative with a verb of the first or second person: Pater noster, qui es in cælis (Matt 6:9), "our Father, who art in heaven"; the Latin verb agrees with the vocative antecedent (qui es), not with the third person.
• Relative position: the relative stands as near its antecedent as possible, and the antecedent may be placed inside the relative clause, a feature that the Hebrew-based and Greek-based Vulgate retains (chapter 14).

9. How Mova handles it

The pipeline (2026-10-22). UPOS for pronouns is PRON for a pronoun that stands for a noun (ego, qui, quis) and DET for one that modifies (hic, ille, noster, meus, and, in LLCT, also some accusatives like me in the accusative-and-infinitive clause: la_llct train-s2, constat me Sanitulum …). For the parser, en xpos-fill turns PRON into PRP, WP if PronType=Rel or Int, PRP$ if Poss=Yes; and DET into DT, WDT for relative and interrogative determiners (quod with a noun), or PRP$. The person and the case of the pronoun are not given to the parser.

UD conventions. The relation of a relative clause is acl:relcl; of a relative pronoun inside it nsubj, obj or obl by its function. LLCT has 3 140 acl:relcl and 154 ccomp:relcl (train, 2026-10-22). The feature PronType (Prs, Rel, Int, Dem, Ind, Tot, Neg) and Reflex=Yes mark the class. LLCT tags every one of the 2 597 tokens of ipse in its train set as DET with PronType=Dem, whatever the use (intensive "self", or the article-like ipsa casa of the charters); UD also has a value Emp for the emphatic pronoun, which the Latin treebanks do not use for it. The five treebanks differ in the attachment of ipse and īdem and in whether a possessive is DET or ADJ; the 2023 harmonisation fixed the second (DET).

Where it stops. Mova does not know that quis after sī is "anyone" while quis at the head of a clause is "who?"; it treats the word form and the position as a flat sequence of tags. The reflexive's antecedent is not computed, and so the indirect reflexive of Caesar above is outside what can be said about the tree.

Sources for this chapter. Bennett 1918 §§82–92, 242–253, 355; Allen & Greenough 1903 (paraphrased); examples: Caes. B. G. 1.1, 1.3, 1.4, 1.14; Cic. Cat. 1.1, 1.9 (Latin Library, with the numbering of the file); Vulgate Ex 3:14, Matt 6:9, 16:15, John 1:3, 14:6 (Clementine); UD_Latin-LLCT train.

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