Grammatical person (linguistics)

The word "person" comes from the Latin persona (originally 'mask', especially in connection with the theater). In everyday language, this word refers to beings with whom one can communicate, usually people. In this meaning of the word, for example, someone is said to be a (natural) person.

The grammatical term person is different and refers to a grammatical feature that certain expressions carry. In this sense, an expression denoting someone or something is said to be in the 1st, 2nd or 3rd (grammatical) person. This grammatical term is not limited to people, although referring to people in the first and second person is the most normal case. The word personal pronoun refers to the grammatical person, namely a pronoun expressing a personal characteristic, and therefore applies equally to reference to things and abstracts.

Its use as a grammatical term and its common numbering originate with the ancient grammarian Dionysius Thrax (170/160 to c. 90 B.C.), who wrote the oldest grammar in Europe that has survived to the present day. He formulated, "The first person is the one from whom the speech proceeds, the second to whom the speech is addressed, and the third over whom the speech passes." The word he used, πρόσωπον (prosōpon), means primarily 'face', but unlike the German word Person, it is not restricted to personal beings, but can also denote the appearance of a thing. The ambiguity of person in German thus comes about through translation.

In the Arabic grammatical tradition, the first person is called al-mutakallim, meaning 'the one who speaks', the second al-muḫāṭab, meaning 'the one who is addressed', and the third al-ġāʔib, 'the one who is absent'.

But there is also the case of the reverse order. In Indian grammar, the following numbering is used:

• prathamapuruṣa means 'first person', i.e. the one about whom the speech is going (it corresponds to our third person).
• madhyamapuruṣa means 'middle person', i.e. the one to whom the speech is addressed (it corresponds to our second person).
• uttamapuruṣa means 'last person', i.e. the one from whom the speech proceeds (it corresponds to our first person).

Grammatical person is a feature that can occur in two ways:

• It comes to an expression that itself denotes individuals: Then the expression shows the speech situation role of this individual as speaker, addressee or third party. In this case, the personal feature is firmly connected with the expression.
• It comes to an expression which does not itself denote individuals, but is connected by a congruence rule (feature correspondence) with an expression which already bears personal features. Here, person occurs as a feature in the inflection (the grammatical formation of forms) of a word.

The grammatical category person in this sense thus always assumes cases where an individual is named in the sentence content - it does not extend to cases where only the form of a sentence reflects properties of the utterance situation, as in the case of markers of respect for the addressee or of the social status or gender of the actual speaker.