Grammatical person


In linguistics, a grammatical person distinguishes between deictic references to one or more participants in an event. Typically, the distinction is between the speaker, the addressee, and others. A language's set of pronouns is typically defined by grammatical persons. First person includes the speaker, second person is the person or people spoken to, and third person includes all that are not listed above. It also frequently affects verbs, and sometimes nouns or possessive relationships.

Related classifications

Number

In Indo-European languages, first-, second-, and third-person pronouns are typically also marked for singular and plural forms, and sometimes dual form as well.

Inclusive/exclusive distinction

Some other languages use different classifying systems, especially in the plural pronouns. One frequently found difference not present in most Indo-European languages is a contrast between inclusive and exclusive "we": a distinction of first-person plural pronouns between including or excluding the addressee.

Honorifics

Many languages express person with different morphemes in order to distinguish degrees of formality and informality. A simple honorific system common among European languages is the T–V distinction. Some other languages have much more elaborate systems of formality that go well beyond the T–V distinction, and use many different pronouns and verb forms that express the speaker's relationship with the people they are addressing. Many Malayo-Polynesian languages, such as Javanese and Balinese, are well known for their complex systems of honorifics; Japanese, Korean, and Chinese also have similar systems to a lesser extent.

Effect on verbs

In many languages, the verb takes a form dependent on the person of the subject and whether it is singular or plural. In English, this happens with the verb to be as follows:
  • I am
  • you are/thou art
  • he, she, one, it is
  • we are
  • you are/ye are
  • they are
Other verbs in English take the suffix -s to mark the present tense third person singular, excluding singular 'they'.
In many languages, such as French, the verb in any given tense takes a different suffix for any of the various combinations of person and number of the subject.

Additional persons

The grammar of some languages divide the semantic space into more than three persons. The extra categories may be termed fourth person, fifth person, etc. Such terms are not absolute but can refer, depending on context, to any of several phenomena.
Some Algonquian languages and Salishan languages divide the category of third person into two parts: proximate for a more topical third person, and obviative for a less topical third person. The obviative is sometimes called the fourth person. In this manner, Hindi and Bangla may also categorize pronouns in the fourth, and with the latter a fifth person.
The term in Finnic languages, fourth person is also sometimes used for the category of indefinite or generic referents, which work like one in English phrases such as "one should be prepared" or people in "people say that...", when the grammar treats them differently from ordinary third-person forms. The so-called "zero person" in Finnish and related languages, in addition to passive voice, may serve to leave the subject-referent open. Zero person subjects are sometimes translated as "one", although in tone it is similar to English's generic you; "Ei saa koskettaa".

English personal pronouns in the nominative case

Grammar