Grammatical person

"First Person Plural" redirects here. For the book by Cameron West, see First Person Plural: My Life As A Multiple.

"Second person singular" redirects here. For the novel by Sayed Kashua, see Second Person Singular (novel).

For other uses, see Narrative mode.

Grammatical person, in linguistics, is the grammatical distinction between deictic references to participant(s) in an event; typically the distinction is between the speaker (first person), the addressee (second person), and others (third person). Put in simple colloquial English, first person is that which includes the speaker, namely, "I", "we", "me", and "us", second person is the person or people spoken to, literally, "you", and third person includes all that is not listed above. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns. It also frequently affects verbs, and sometimes nouns or possessive relationships.

English 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 gender-neutral singular	common
they	Third-person plural
Dialectal
me	First-person singular, dialectal Caribbean English and colloquial special uses
thee	Second-person singular, 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 and African American English
ye	Second-person plural, dialectal Hiberno-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
youse	Second-person plural, Australian English, many urban American dialects like New York City English and Chicago English, as well as Ottawa Valley 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
thee	Second-person singular informal object
ye	Second-person plural

In Romance languages such as Spanish, the grammatical person affects the verb conjugation.
In this image, each row represents person and number: first person, second-person informal and second-person formal and third person.
Columns represent tense (image: morning – past, noon – present, night – future).

Related classifications

Grammatical categories
Affect Polarity Agreement Animacy Argument/Complement/Adjunct Associated motion Associativity Boundedness Branching Classifier Clusivity Comparison Construct state Contrast Countability/Uncountability Dative construction/Quirky subject Dative shift Declension Definiteness Evidentiality Feature Focus Genitive construction Aspect Case Conjugation Grammatical gender/Noun class Mood Number Person Tense Honorifics Incorporation Inflection Lexical aspect (Aktionsart) Modality Markedness Mirativity Negation Pluractionality Polypersonal agreement Possession Predicate Reciprocity Serial verb construction Singulative-Collective-Pluractive Specificity Subject/Object Suffixaufnahme (Case stacking) Telicity Tense–aspect–mood Thematic relation (Agent/Patient) Topic and Comment Transitivity Valency Voice Volition

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 (grammatical number). Some languages, especially European ones, distinguish degrees of formality and informality (T-V 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.

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 and Korean 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 (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)

Other verbs in English take the suffix -s to mark the present tense third person singular.

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 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 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, 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," but the problem with that is that English language constructions involving one, e.g. "One hopes that will not happen," are rare and could be considered expressive of an overly academic tone to the majority of people, while Finnish sentences like "Ei saa koskettaa" ("Not allowed to touch") are recognizable to and used by young children in both languages.

See also

• English personal pronouns
• Gender-neutral pronoun
• Gender-specific pronoun
• Generic antecedents
• Generic you
• Grammatical conjugation
• Grammatical number
• Illeism
• Personal pronoun
• Singular they
• Verb

References

• de Gaynesford, Robert Maximillian (2006). I: The Meaning of the First Person Term. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

External links

• "person", Grammatical Features Inventory, doi:10.15126/SMG.18/1.03