Grammatical person
Grammatical category distinguishing between speakers, listeners, and others
In linguistics, a grammatical person distinguishes between deictic references to one or more participants in an event. Typically, the distinction is between the speaker (first person), the addressee (second person), and others (third person). A language's set of pronouns is typically defined by grammatical persons. First person includes the speaker (English: I, we), second person is the person or people spoken to (English: your or you), and third person includes all that are not listed above (English: he, she, it, they). It also frequently affects verbs, and sometimes nouns or possessive relationships.
02Other parts of speech
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 (first-person singular)
- you are/thou art (second-person singular)
- he, she, one, it is (third-person singular)
- we are (first-person plural)
- you are/ye are (second-person plural)
- they are (third-person plural, and third-person singular)
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.
Nouns
The Elamite language had person declension also in nouns, forming a word with the meaning "I/You/they, the [noun]", e.g.:
- sunki-k = I, the king,...
- sunki-t = you, the king,...
- sunki-r = he, the king,...
03Additional 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.
The fourth person term is also sometimes used for the category of impersonal verbs in Skolt Saami. 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" ("Not allowed to touch", "You should not touch").
04English personal pronouns in the nominative case
| Pronoun | Person and number | Gender |
|---|---|---|
| Standard | ||
| I | First-person singular | |
| we | First-person plural | |
| you | Second-person singular or second-person plural | |
| he | Third-person masculine singular | masculine |
| she | Third-person feminine singular | feminine |
| it | Third-person neuter (and inanimate) singular | neuter |
| they | Third-person plural or gender-neutral singular | epicene |
| Dialectal | ||
| me | First-person singular, dialectal Caribbean English and colloquial special uses | |
| thee | Second-person singular, literary, dialectal Yorkshire, and occasional use by Quakers | |
| allyuh | Second-person plural, many English-based creole languages, dialectal Caribbean English | |
| unu | Second-person plural, many English-based creole languages, dialectal Caribbean English | |
| y'all | Second-person plural, dialectal Southern American, Texan English, and African-American English | |
| ye | Second-person plural, dialectal Hiberno-English and Newfoundland English | |
| yinz | Second-person plural, Scots, dialectal Scottish English, Pittsburgh English | |
| you guys | Second-person plural, dialectal American English and Canadian English | |
| you(r) lot | Second-person plural, dialectal British English | |
| yous (guys) | Second-person plural, dialectal New Zealand English | |
| yous(e) | Second-person plural, Australian English, many urban American dialects like New York City English and Chicago English, as well as Ottawa Valley English. Sporadic usage in some British English dialects, such as Mancunian. Also used by some speakers of Hiberno-English. | |
| yourse | Second-person plural, Scots, dialect Central Scottish Lowlands, Scouse, Cumbrian, Tyneside, Hiberno English. | |
| us | First-person plural subject, as in, us guys are going... | |
| them | Third-person plural subject, as in, them girls drove... | |
| Archaic | ||
| thou | Second-person singular informal subject | |
| ye | Second-person plural | |
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Grammatical person”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
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