Chicago Style Workout 40: Grammar, Part 4

/ October 29, 2019

Aim for your personal best!

This workout focuses on paragraphs 5.42–55 of CMOS 18, which cover personal pronouns, including their possessive and reflexive forms. There’s also one question about demonstrative pronouns (CMOS 5.56).

(Hint: You don’t need to know all the terminology to take the quiz, but it will help if you know a little.)

Subscribers to The Chicago Manual of Style Online may click through to the linked sections of the Manual (cited in the answers). (We also offer a 30-day free trial of CMOS Online.)

Note: Style guides and dictionaries sometimes disagree. This quiz is designed to test your knowledge of The Chicago Manual of Style.

Now updated to refer and link to the 18th edition.

Chicago Style Workout 40: Grammar, Part 4

1. The pronoun “it,” which does not usually refer to a person, is not a true personal pronoun.
2. Whereas a first-person pronoun refers to the speaker (“I”), a second-person pronoun refers to the speaker plus a second person (“we”).
3. If the pronoun is the subject of a clause, it is in the nominative case (“she is president”).
4. If a prepositional phrase contains more than one object, only the first one is in the objective case (“will you send an invitation to him and I?”).
5. It is strictly correct to answer the phone “This is he,” not “This is him.”
6. “My sister looks more like our father than me” is grammatically incorrect; it should be “than I.”
7. As a gender-neutral singular pronoun, “they” takes a plural verb (“they have”).
8. When it is used with the preposition “of,” the possessive form of a personal pronoun retains an apostrophe: “that letter of Sheila’s” becomes “that letter of her’s.”
9. A reflexive pronoun should be used in a compound object to achieve a polite tone: “Deliver the equipment to my partner or myself.”
10. The demonstrative pronoun “these” in “these have just arrived” cannot refer to people.

 

Photo: Bowling at Camp Zama, by Sgt. John L. Carkeet IV, US Army Japan, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

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