In the recently published ‘Oxford Modern English Grammar’, Bas Aarts classifies pronouns with nouns and not as a separate word class. In this, he follows the authors of ‘The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language’. Is this now a widely accepted practice in pedagogic circles on both sides of the Atlantic?
Learn English – Pronouns: a word class or a subclass of nouns
pronouns
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My answer complements this and a previous discussion of the issue
Pronouns: a word class or a subclass of nouns?
by quoting extensively from Aarts' analysis in Modern English Grammar on pages 44-46 under the heading Pronouns (Oxford University Press, 2011).
Pronouns belong to the class of nouns because they can head noun phrases that function as Subject, Direct Object, and Indirect Object, Complement of a preposition and Predicative Complement.
Aarts goes on to note:
In some grammars pronouns are regarded as a separate word class. There are a number of reasons for this. Among them are the following:
Pronouns show a distinction between nominative, accusative and genitive case, while common nouns do not.
Pronouns show a distinction for person (first person, 2nd person, etc.) and gender (he/she, him/her, etc.) but common nouns do not.
Pronouns do not have inflectional plurals in Standard English (cf. *yous, *hes, etc.), although they do have singular vs plural person distinctions (e.g. I vs we). ...
Pronouns are much more limited than common nouns in their potential for taking dependents. For example, while we can have determinatives and adjectives in front of common nouns, they cannot generally determine and modify pronouns. Thus we cannot say *The he left the meeting or *Intelligent you did well in the exams. ... Nouns can be followed by prepositional phrases as in my cancellation of the reservation; pronouns generally cannot.
Noun phrases with common nouns as Head can have independent reference, while pronouns rely on the linguistic or extra-linguistic context for their reference. Thus, if I say I met the boss this morning the NP the boss refers to a mutually identifiable individual. ... If I say Katie married Harry because she loves him then the most likely reading of this utterance is for she to refer to Katie and for him to refer to Harry.
Despite these observations we take the fact that pronouns can act as the Heads of phrases that can function as Subject, Direct Object, Predicative Complement, and so on, as a sufficiently weighty reason for regarding them as nouns.
I think Aarts makes a convincing enough case for pronouns to be regarded as a sub-class of noun rather than a word class in their own right. But I do not expect that this modern analysis will have much impact on pedagogic grammars (as opposed to Aarts' descriptive grammar) or teaching materials.
Best Answer
Pronouns are a subclass of nouns and a subclass of anaphora (or pro-forms). One could define them as anaphoric nouns. Since they are nouns, they should not be classified as separate from nouns.
The answer to your question depends on what you mean by "...classifies pronouns with nouns and not as a separate word class." If you mean that Bas Aarts says that pronouns are a subclass of nouns, then the answer is yes: pronouns are taught and understood to be a type of noun.
If you mean that Aarts does not draw any distinction between pronouns and other nouns, then no, pronouns are still taught and understood to be distinct from other nouns by reason of their anaphoric nature.
If you mean, however, that distinctions are drawn between anaphoric nouns and other nouns, but the name pronoun is not kept (i.e. pronouns as well as all other nouns are called nouns and nothing else), then the answer is no. Anaphoric nouns are still commonly called pronouns.