Editing Demonstrative (section)

==Demonstrative determiners and pronouns==
It is relatively common for a language to distinguish between '''demonstrative determiners''' or '''demonstrative adjectives''' (sometimes also called ''determinative demonstratives'', ''adjectival demonstratives'' or ''adjectival demonstrative pronouns'') and '''demonstrative pronouns''' (sometimes called ''independent demonstratives'', ''substantival demonstratives'', ''independent demonstrative pronouns'' or ''substantival demonstrative pronouns'').

A demonstrative [[determiner (linguistics)|determiner]] specifies a noun as [[Definiteness|definite]], singular or plural, and proximal or distal:

:''This apple is good.''
:''I like those houses.''

A demonstrative [[pronoun]] stands on its own, replacing rather than modifying a noun:

:''This is good.''
:''I like those.''

There are four common demonstrative pronouns in English: ''this'', ''that'', ''these'', ''those.''<ref>{{Cite book |last1=Aarts |first1=Bas |title=The Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar |last2=Chalker |first2=Sylvia |last3=Weiner |first3=Edmund |publisher=Oxford University Press |year=2014 |isbn=978-0-19-965823-7 |edition=2nd |pages=113}}</ref> Some dialects, such as [[Southern American English]], also use ''yon'' and ''yonder'', where the latter is usually employed as a demonstrative determiner.<ref name=Bryson>{{cite book |last=Bryson |first=Bill |author-link=Bill Bryson |year=1990 |title=The Mother Tongue: English & How it Got that Way |location=New York |publisher=William Morrow |isbn=0-688-07895-8 |pages=63–64 }}</ref> Author [[Bill Bryson]] laments the "losses along the way" of ''yon'' and ''yonder'':<ref name="Bryson" />

{{blockquote|Today we have two demonstrative pronouns, ''this'' and ''that'', but in [[Shakespeare]]'s day there was a third, ''yon'' (as in the [[John Milton|Milton]] line "Him that yon soars on golden wing"), which suggested a further distance than ''that''. You could talk about this hat, that hat, and yon hat. Today the word survives as a colloquial [[adjective]], ''yonder'', but our speech is fractionally impoverished for its loss.}}