In linguistics, a pro-form is a type of function word or expression (linguistics) that stands in for (expresses the same content as) another word, phrase, clause or sentence where the meaning is recoverable from the context.
[1] They are used either to avoid repetitive expressions or in quantification (limiting the variables of a proposition).
The rules governing allowable syntactic relations between certain pro-forms (notably personal and reflexive/reciprocal pronouns) and their antecedents have been studied in what is called binding theory.
Some 19th-century grammars of Latin, such as Raphael Kühner's 1844 grammar,[3] organized non-personal pronouns (interrogative, demonstrative, indefinite/quantifier, relative) in a table of "correlative" pronouns due to their similarities in morphological derivation and their syntactic relationships (as correlative pairs) in that language.
The following chart shows comparison between English, French (irregular) and Japanese (regular): (Note that "daremo", "nanimo" and "dokomo" are universal quantifiers with positive verbs.)