Grammatical person

Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to the participant role of a referent, such as the speaker, the addressee, and 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 and we are said to be in the first person. The speaker uses this in the singular to refer to himself or herself; in the plural, to speak of a group of people including the speaker.

The personal pronoun you is in the second person. It refers to the addressee. You is used in both the singular and plural; thou is the archaic second-person singular pronoun.

All other pronouns and all nouns are in the third person. Any person place or thing other than the speaker and the addressed is referred to in the third person.

See English personal pronouns, and the following articles on specific grammatical persons, or their corresponding personal pronouns:

• I (1st. person singular)
• Thou (2nd. person singular, archaic)
• You (2nd. person singular/plural)
• He (3rd. person singular, masculine)
• She (3rd. person singular, feminine)
• It (3rd. person singular, neuter)
• One (morphologically 3rd. person singular, though semantically equivalent to "we")
• We (1st. person plural)
• Y'all (2nd. person plural, dialectal)
• Ye (2nd. person plural, archaic)
• They (3rd. person plural)

Additional persons

In Indo-European languages, first-, second-, and third-person pronouns are all marked for singular and plural forms, and sometimes dual forms 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 he or she addresses. 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 (second-person plural)
• they are (third-person plural)

By contrast, Interlingua uses a single verb form for the three persons: es for is, am, and are, ha for has and have, and so on.

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 languages, the best-known examples being Algonquian 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", when the grammar treats them differently from ordinary third-person forms.

See also

• Grammatical conjugation
• Grammatical number
• Generic you
• Singular they
• Personal pronoun
• Verb

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