Peter,
Good set of questions. First person is the person speaking. Second person is the person spoken to. Third person is anyone you're talking about. Pronouns get classified as follows in grammar texts. (1/2/3/for persons, s for singular, and p for plural.)
Subject
1s I
2s you
3s he/she/it
1p we
2p you
3p they
Object
1s me
2s you
3s him/her/it
1p us
2p you
3p them
Possessive
1s my/mine
2s your/yours
3s his//her/hers//its
1p our/ours
2p your/yours
3p their/theirs
Reflexive
1s myself
2s yourself
3s himself/herself/itself
1p ourselves
2p yourselves
3p themselves
Within the 3s forms is a masculine/feminine/neuter gender distinction that used to be important in English grammar but isn't very anymore. For most speakers now, gender reference is strictly natural: if we think of something as female we use she/her/hers/herself, unlike in German where every noun has gender and the pronoun used to refer to a housefly (die Fliege), for example, must be "sie" (she). It doesn't matter whether it's a boy fly or a girl fly.
You'll notice that in the second person we don't distinguish between singular and plural except in the reflexive, where the noun stem "self" can take the plural form. English used to have a 2s, thee/thou/thy/thine/thyself, but they became archaic and was replace by "you" forms in the 15th through 17th cc.
By the way, some languages, including language of the Americas, Africa, and even Classical and Koine Greek, can distinguish between a third person and a fourth person, where the fourth person form is used for a third person who was referred to earlier than a more recent third person reference. Gets messy.
English also used to have a dual number, pronouns meaning "we two" and "you two", but they died out late in Old English, around the time of the Norman Conquest.
Herb
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of Peter Adams
Sent: Thu 6/28/2007 9:38 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Person
I keep finding that the more I think about things, the less I know. Now I
have stumbled over a concept I thought I understood back in about sixth grade:
grammatical person--1st person, 2cd etc.
So here's what is stymieing me. Is person a feature of pronouns? nouns,
too? verbs too? Is "am" a first person singular verb? Are "I" and "we"
the only two first person pronouns or are "me" and "us" also first person?
Are all nouns third person? Do pronouns (and nouns if they have it at all)
have person only when they are subjects of clauses or anywhere they appear?
In this sentence, Is "you" second person (the person being spoken to) or third
person (the person being spoken about) or does only the subject have person?
We were talking about you.
In this sentence, is "you" the person "spoken to" or "spoken about" or both?
You are a good-hearted soul.
I'm coming to the idea that first person is the pronoun I or we, second
person is the pronoun you, and third person is any other pronoun or any noun or
verbal.
Peter Adams
**************************************
See what's free at
http://www.aol.com.
To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"
Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"
Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
|
