Pronoun

In quizbowl, a pronoun is a phrase within a question that explicitly refers to the answer. A pronoun can be likened to a signpost that points the way to the answer, or thought of as a placeholder that substitutes for the answer.

Good pronoun usage is essential to clear, fair quizbowl questions. It is good practice for every sentence or line of a question to contain a full pronoun, and it is vital for a full pronoun to appear early in the first sentence of all tossups.

Definition

In modern quizbowl, a full pronoun is typically formed by using the word "this" or "these" followed by the general category of the answer (e.g. "this composer," "these creatures").

For example, consider the sentence In a novel titled for one of these animals, the protagonist claims that “prime numbers are like life,” explaining why they are used to number the book’s chapters (from 2019 EFT). The phrase "these animals" functions as a pronoun in the quizbowl sense and indicates that the answer is an animal (namely, dog), while the word "they" functions as a pronoun only in the colloquial English sense but not in the quizbowl sense (and its antecedent is "prime numbers" and not "these animals").

What to avoid

Phrases that superficially have the same form as a pronoun may cause confusion and should be avoided. For example, in the sentence George Herbert claims that the “immortal” variety of this concept is the “author of this great frame” in one of several poems titled for this concept (from 2018 EFT), the pronoun is "this concept," but the phrase "this great frame" (which is a direct quotation from a poem) can unintentionally throw players off because the words "this" and "these" almost always signal a pronoun in the quizbowl sense, and players have become thoroughly accustomed to these circumstances.

Old quizbowl questions often used (exclusively or excessively) incomplete or very general pronouns, such as "he," "she," "it," "they," "one," "ones," or simply "this" or "these" by itself, or even omitted any pronoun entirely. This practice makes it much more difficult to identify what a question is asking for. In modern quizbowl, full but overly general pronouns like "this thing" or "this entity" are typically avoided for similar reasons.

Etymology

The quizbowl term "pronoun" satisfies a somewhat broad, yet perfectly valid, interpretation of both the ordinary English usage and technical linguistic usage of the term "pronoun." The Oxford Online Dictionary, for example, defines a pronoun as "a word that can function by itself as a noun phrase and that refers either to the participants in the discourse (e.g., I, you) or to someone or something mentioned elsewhere in the discourse (e.g., she, it, this)."

The term "pronoun" is long-established quizbowl jargon and has been widely used and understood in quizbowl contexts going back to at least 1995.

Attempts to deprecate the term "pronoun" by people who misguidedly believe it to be an incorrect usage, in favor of other words like "designator," "identifier," "indicator," "referent," etc. have not caught on, and ironically many of the proposed alternatives are technically less correct and less intuitive than "pronoun."