Pronoun

In quizbowl, a pronoun is a word or phrase within a question that explicitly refers to the answer and signals the type of information that the answer is seeking; the word indicator is a common alternative. 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.

Explanation

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 anyhow, its antecedent is prime numbers and not these animals).

It is common to use short pronouns such as "he" or "she" (instead of "this composer," for example) given that at least one full pronoun is already used earlier in the question.

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 (especially in a collocation like the author of this), and quizbowl 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.

Overly general and ambiguous pronouns like "this thing" or "this entity" are typically avoided (unless there is a very good reason). Some style guides prohibit certain pronouns, such as "work," "figure," or "polity" (see Quizbowlese).

Switching between different pronouns merely for the sake of variety ("this nation... this country") is unnecessary because quizbowl questions are to be written more like straightforward technical documents that value clarity, not literary works that value avoiding "clunky" repetition.

Experimenting

Experiments to change pronoun conventions in the modern era of quizbowl have been poorly received, with both players and moderators reporting significant confusion and jarring experiences.

2011 MAGNI was among the last sets to not always use full pronouns in every sentence - the ensuing backlash helped cement that as an "unspoken rule".

At 2016 HSNCT, phrases like name this author of Oliver Twist were replaced with name the author of Oliver Twist. This change, approved by the editors due one of them lobbying against the perceived "illogicality" of the former construction, was heavily criticized, especially for its poor timing of picking the largest-ever quizbowl tournament to experiment with established conventions (instead of trying a pilot at a much less consequential event).

Several question sets have experimented with using gender-neutral pronouns (like singular "they") to point to answers on a specific person: see ARTSEE, Cambridge Open, Oxford Open, 2018 EFT, and isolated parts of other sets.

Etymology

The term "pronoun" is long-established quizbowl jargon and has been widely used in quizbowl contexts going back to at least the 1980s. In this pre-modern period, usage of pronouns in quizbowl aligned exactly with usage in ordinary English usage e.g. "he", "she", "it", "they". Since then, conventions have shifted and "full pronouns" always include the category of answer, making them no longer pronouns in the conventional sense. The continued, unintuitive use of "pronoun" after this divergence is consistently a point of confusion for newer players.

Quizbowl's usage of "pronoun" does still behave analogously to the ordinary English usage and technical linguistic usage of a pronoun as something that refers "to someone or something mentioned elsewhere in the discourse." It even satisfies some broad definitions of the term that drop the requirement that pronouns be a single word (including the lede of the Wikipedia article); however, these are non-standard.

The newly popular term "indicator" is the most successful of many attempts to deprecate "pronoun". Previous examples like "cataphor," "designator," "descriptor," "determiner," "hypernym," "identifier," "referent," "target word," etc. largely did not catch on, with several being technically less correct and less intuitive than "pronoun."

The existence of multiple terms for this concept will likely make it harder to find historical discourse on this important topic.