Person

Person is an inflectional dimension used mostly on verbal predicates, possessed nouns and adpositions to denote the speech act participants speaker and hearer and their contrast with non-speech act particiants. In some languages, the dimension person is not categorized into speaker vs. hearer vs. non-speech act participants, but into what is called conjunct, locutor, informant, or epistemic source vs. other. The conjunct (locutor/informant/epistemic source) person is the speaker in statements and the addressee in questions.

Inflectional categories

• First person
• Second person
• Third person
• Fourth person
• Locutor
• Conjunct
• Epistemic source
• Informant

See also

• Impersonal
• Inclusive vs. exclusive

Origin

The term person and the names for the three main categories (first, second, third) go back to the ancient Greek grammarians.

References

• Siewierska, Anna. 2003. Person. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Bickel, Balthasar & Nichols, Johanna. 2007. Inflectional morphology. In: Shopen, T. [ed.] "Language typology and syntactic description". Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Other languages

• French personne
• German Person (de)
• Russian лицо