Grammatical categories
Animacy
Aspect
Case
Clusivity
Definiteness
Degree of comparison
Evidentiality
Focus
Gender
Mirativity
Modality
Mood
Noun class
Number
Person
Polarity
Tense
Topic
Transitivity
Voice
Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns. It also frequently affects verbs, sometimes nouns, and possessive relationships as well.
Grammatical person in English
English distinguishes three grammatical persons: The personal pronouns I (singular) and we (plural) are in the first person. The personal pronoun you is the second person. It refers to the addressee. You is used in both the singular and plural; thou is the archaic informal second-person singular pronoun.
Any person, place, or thing other than the speaker and the addressee is referred to in the third person. When referring to oneself in the third person, it is illeism. See English personal pronouns, and the following articles on specific grammatical persons, or their corresponding personal pronouns:
Pronoun Person/plurality GenderStandard
I First person singular -
You Second person singular/plural -
He Third person singular, masculine / gender-neutral third person singular masculine
She Third person singular, feminine feminine
It Third person singular, neuter neuter
We First person plural -
They Third person plural/gender-neutral third person singular (correctness of this usage disputed) -
Colloquial
Youse Second person plural, dialect -
Yinz Second person plural, dialect -
Ye Second person plural, dialectal Hiberno-English -
Y'all Second person plural, dialectal African American English and Southern American English -
Archaic
Thou Second person singular, archaic -
Ye/you Second person plural, archaic -
Additional persons
In Indo-European languages, first-, second-, and third-person pronouns are typically marked for singular and plural form, and sometimes dual form as well (see grammatical number). Some languages, especially European, distinguish degrees of formality and informality. See T-V distinction.
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 pronouns of including or excluding the addressee.
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 and Korean also have similar systems to a lesser extent.
In many languages, the verb takes a form dependent on this person and whether it is singular or plural. In English, this happens with the verb to be as follows:
- I am (first-person singular)
- you are/thou art (second-person singular)
- he, she, one or it is (third-person singular)
- we are (first-person plural)
- you are/ye are (second-person plural)
- they are (third-person plural)
The grammars 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 languages, including among 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.
The term fourth person is also sometimes used for the category of indefinite or generic referents, that 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. For example, the so-called "passive tense" in Finnish and related languages is actually not a tense, and has the same meaning as a phrase with subjects "one" or "people" in English.
References
- de Gaynesford, Robert Maximillian (2006). I: The Meaning of the First Person Term. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
See also
Look up grammatical person in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.