By now you should be aware that a pronoun is a word that replaces one or more nouns in a sentence. For example: “Martha’s family is coming soon.” can be reworded using a pronoun so that it will then read, “Her family is coming soon.” In this case “her” is a personal pronoun.
Personal pronouns have three cases. These include: nominative, objective and possessive. The manner in which the pronoun is used in a sentence will determine which case it belongs to. For this quiz we will focus on nominative case pronouns and objective case pronouns.
Nominative Case Pronoun: A nominative case pronoun is when the pronoun is used as the subject in a sentence. Nominative case pronouns include: I, you, she, he, they, we and it. An example of a nominative case pronoun would be: She ate the cookie. “She” is the subject of this sentence.
As you may remember, a simple sentence is composed of three parts: the subject - the verb - the object. “She” is the subject, “ate” is the verb and “cookie” is the object.
Objective Case Pronoun: An objective case pronoun is when the pronouns me, you, him, us, it, her and them are used as a direct object, indirect object or an object of a preposition.
An example of a pronoun used as a direct object would be: “Our collie likes her.” In this sentence, the collie is the subject, likes is the verb and “her” is the direct object.
An example of an indirect object would be: “Theresa cooked us a huge dinner.” In this sentence, Theresa is the subject, cooked is the verb and dinner is the object. The word “us” is an indirect object included within the sentence because it can be removed and the sentence would still be a complete, intact sentence.
Finally, an example of an object of a preposition would be: “Tommy can ride with you.” In this sentence, Tommy is the subject and ride is the verb. It can stand alone as a sentence, however, to give the sentence more detail, a preposition (with) is added along with an object “you” making the sentence a more complete sentence and since “you” is the object of “with”, it is an objective case pronoun.