QUPR Quantifying pronouns
Definition
Indefinite/quantifying pronouns: anybody, everyone, nothing, something, somebody, etc.
Detection Rules
mfte
cql[word={words}]
Word list (15 items)
anybody
anyone
anything
everybody
everyone
everything
nobody
none
noone
no-one
nothing
others
somebody
someone
something
pybiber
pybiber blob patterns use _\S* (any POS tag) for indefinite pronouns. No POS constraint — catches all tagged variants.
cql[word={words}]
Word list (13 items)
anybody
anyone
anything
everybody
everyone
everything
nobody
none
nothing
nowhere
somebody
someone
something
Normalization
Per finite_verbs
Examples
said Alice aloud, addressing nobody in particular.
Source: le_foll_2024
Sources
- biber_1988 — Biber, Douglas (1988) : Variation across Speech and Writing
- mfte — Le Foll, Elen & Shakir, Muhammad (2023/2025) : Multi-Feature Tagger of English (MFTE) — Python version
- pybiber — Brown, David West & Reinhart, Alex (2026) : pybiber — Python package for linguistic feature extraction and Multi-Dimensional Analysis
- xiao_2009 — Xiao, Richard (2009) : Multidimensional analysis and the study of world Englishes
- grieve_2023 — Grieve, Jack (2023) : Register variation explains stylometric authorship analysis
- bohmann_2019 — Bohmann, Axel (2019) : Variation in English Worldwide: Varieties and Genres in a Quantitative Perspective