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When a personal pronoun is the subject of a verb, the subjective form of the pronounmust be used.e.g. 1 understand what you mean.He saw the comet.In these sentences, the underlined pronouns are the subjects of the verbs understandand saw; therefore, the subjective forms I and he must be used.When a personal pronoun is the object of a verb, the objective form of the pronounmust be used.e.g. My friends understand me.We saw him last night.In these sentences, the underlined pronouns are the objects of the verbs understandand saw; therefore, the objective forms me and him must be used.The rules for the agreement of pronouns with their antecedents are the same forpronouns in the objective case as for the corresponding pronouns in the subjective case.e.g. When your son won the prize, we congratulated him.Your daughter thinks we have not noticed her.When the letter arrived, we answered it immediately.He and I were right, but no one believed us.Because the boats were barely moving, we overtook them easily.In the preceding sentences, the pronouns him, her, it, us and them agree with theantecedents son, daughter, letter, he and I and boats, respectively.See Exercises 5, 6 and 7.It should be noted that the verb to be does not take an object. In formal, writtenEnglish, when the verb to be is immediately followed by a personal pronoun, thepronoun must usually be in the subjective case. In the following examples, the pronounsfollowing the verb to be are in the subjective case.e.g. It is 1.That was he.This is she.Those are they.However, in informal English, this rule is usually ignored. In informal English, when apronoun immediately follows any verb, including the verb to be, the objective form ofthe pronoun is usually used. Thus, in informal English the sentence It is I would usuallybe expressed It is me, and the sentence That was he would usually be expressed Thatwas him.See Exercise 8.As well as being used as the objects of verbs, personal pronouns in the objective caseare used as objects of prepositions. Prepositions are words such as at, in, on, to andwith. A preposition links the words immediately followi ng it to the rest of the sentence.A noun or pronoun which forms part of a prepositional phrase is said to be the object ofthe preposition. For instance, the underlined pronouns in the following examples are

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