Knowra Person (grammar) Person (grammar) Person is a grammatical category that locates a noun phrase or verb relative to the speech event, typically distinguishing speaker, addressee, and others.
Deixis : The use of linguistic expressions whose interpretation depends on context, including who is speaking and when or where. Person is deictic because first, second, and third person are anchored to the speech event.
Inclusive and exclusive we : A distinction between first-person plural forms that include or exclude the addressee. It shows that plural first person can encode whether the listener belongs to the group.
Personal pronoun : A pronoun whose reference is tied to a speech participant or to someone outside the speech event. Its forms commonly distinguish first, second, and third person directly.
English personal pronouns : The English pronoun set distinguishing forms such as I, you, he, she, it, we, and they. English illustrates person contrasts while leaving many distinctions, such as inclusive versus exclusive we, unmarked.
Speech act : An utterance considered as an action, such as asserting, questioning, promising, or ordering. The speaker and addressee that define person are participants in a speech act.
Impersonal construction : A clause pattern that lacks a specific referential subject or presents an action without naming its agent. Impersonal clauses show how languages can avoid assigning an ordinary speech-participant role.
Pro-drop language : A language in which a clause can omit a subject pronoun when context or verb morphology identifies it. Person agreement can make an overt subject pronoun unnecessary.
Japanese pronouns : Pronouns used in Japanese, a language where reference is often omitted and forms vary with social context. Japanese demonstrates that person reference need not rely on a fixed, obligatory pronoun inventory.
Pronoun : A word class whose members can substitute for noun phrases or identify discourse participants. Personal pronouns are the clearest markers of grammatical person in many languages.
Honorific : A linguistic form that expresses social respect, status, or relationship between participants. Some languages use person-marked forms to address someone indirectly or deferentially.
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