Imagination and pronouns

1. Imagination is, basically, the faculty of seeing an object without it being present before our eyes.
2. This faculty was indispensable to begin to stop being the animals that we were and to begin to transform ourselves into true Homo Sapiens.
3. The first great plastic work preserved (actually there are several that occurred in several moments not so far apart in time) in the history of mankind, were pictorial works that we know today with the name of “cave paintings”.
4. These famous paintings have in common the characteristic of having a naturalness that seems to us so incredibly achieved that many do not hesitate to classify them within modern art.
5. They also have in common that they were painted inside caves, far away from the entrance to them. In other words, the painter (or painters) did not have the model to paint in front of his eyes.
6. This is precisely the birth of the imagination: to have in mind an object that is not in front of one’s eyes. A faculty that animals do not have (at least it has not been proven otherwise so far).
7. This faculty, the imagination, which begins to form us as men. What happens in our days in which we observe a constant abandonment of the imagination? Will we regress in some way? Some psychologists point out that our generation is already beginning to show signs of intellectual regression, of mental capacity. Precise measurements point to this, although, certainly, there is no conclusive data yet.
8. We, writers, artists of words, are interested in the use of imagination in the fields of linguistics. How do we handle imagination?
9. One of the ways is the use of pronouns that substitute for the noun being spoken about. The object mentioned and which is not in our presence. Let us look at the following grammatical construction: “Roberto is sleepy, he is going to sleep”. It is not difficult to notice that the word “he” replaces the object “Roberto”. That is a simple, but effective example of what imagination in grammar is, the use of personal pronouns.
10. There are other types of pronouns that play a similar role. We will not continue with any more examples. Suffice it to point out that we must use them to replace the subject we are talking about. If anyone is interested in going deeper into the subject, I leave you with this simple page that explains other types of pronouns, http://roble.pntic.mec.es/msanto1/lengua/1pronomb.htm.
11. What is the point of talking about all this? It is the contribution of a point of view of a writer who would like his fellows to use more and more their imagination in their daily life, their daily language. We definitely believe that “training” (to use a word) the imagination in language will begin to make our views of the world more robust and improve our manipulations of it (both of language and of the world itself).

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)