Adrianslont wrote:Dragon27 wrote:Cainntear wrote:In English, is there really any common usage where "all" functions as a pronoun? It seems a bit archaic (if not totally wrong) to actually say "all are ..."
Specifically, common usage where "all" stands for multiple persons, not really, I believe. "Everybody" (and variations) is used instead. The other example in the wiktionary is "A good time was had by all". Can't think of any example where "all" is the (sole) subject with the meaning "everybody", it's much easier when "all" means things, not people (wiktionary, again "All that was left was a small pile of ash").
But the traditional translation of the famous motto "Unus pro omnibus, omnes pro uno" (whose French version "Tous pour un, un pour tous" was made popular by Alexandre Dumas) is "One for all, all for one".
“All are expected to attend the …”
“All are welcome”
“All are examples of … »
Everybody is more common and more modern but all as a pronoun doesn’t seem wrong or archaic to me - but I am not young.
Well I'm no spring chicken myself, it's just that I was hearing "all are welcome" in a booming theatrical voice in my head, like a king or wizard.
Your first example "All are expected..." kind of fits with a general pattern of "officialese" retaining forms that have dropped out of colloquial usage (eg. institional rules saying people you "must" do certain things rather than "you have to" or "you've got to")
Your last one is the one that makes me stop, though.
My conclusion, though, is that it falls into the same group as the "officialese": high register language. I probably wouldn't write it myself in a university essay (preferring "these are all examples of..." or "all of these are examples of...") but I probably wouldn't bat an eyelid if it appeared in a paper I was reading.
...and that leads to the point that "all of these" still could be argued as having "all" as a noun/pronoun because of the "of". However, I would argue that "all" there functions as a quantifier: cf. some of these, many of these, three of these, one of these.
Whether "all" is a pronoun or not is arguably pretty subjective. But I'd say it's pretty clear that "all" is at the very least migrating away from being a pronoun.
In fact, I think the biggest issue is that there has historically been a tendancy to try to categorise words into classes in absolute black-and-white terms. Modern linguistics is happy to recognise that words can exist that straddle class boundaries and can function as two or more classes in a fuzzy manner.