Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
In linguistics, grammatical person is the grammatical distinction between deictic references to participant(s) in an event; typically, the distinction is between the speaker (first person), the addressee (second person), and others (third person).
The first two in the sequence are by far the most common; 'tertiary' appears occasionally, and higher numbers are rare except in specialized contexts ('quaternary period'). The Greek series proto- , deutero- , trito- , ... is only found in prefixes, generally scholarly and technical coinages, e.g. protagonist, deuteragonist, tritagonist ...
Examples of such languages include French, where the singular tu is used only for familiars, the plural vous being used as a singular in other cases (Russian follows a similar pattern); German, where the third-person plural sie (capitalized as Sie) is used as both singular and plural in the second person in non-familiar uses; and Polish, where ...
1st person singular I me my/mine [# 1] mine plural we us our ours 2nd person singular informal thou thee thy/thine [# 1] thine plural informal ye you your yours formal you 3rd person singular he/she/it him/her/it his/her/his (it) [# 2] his/hers/his [# 2] plural they them their theirs
The English personal pronouns are a subset of English pronouns taking various forms according to number, person, case and grammatical gender. Modern English has very little inflection of nouns or adjectives, to the point where some authors describe it as an analytic language, but the Modern English system of personal pronouns has preserved some of the inflectional complexity of Old English and ...
Different forms that can be used in the language include first person singular and plural words, second person singular words like umwi, second person plural words like aumi used to refer to an outside group, and third person plural words. [319]
The third-person singular forms are differentiated according to the gender of the referent. For example, she is used to refer to a female person, sometimes a female animal, and sometimes an object to which female characteristics are attributed, such as a ship or a country. A male person, and sometimes a male animal, is referred to using he.
The ordinal category are based on ordinal numbers such as the English first, second, third, which specify position of items in a sequence. In Latin and Greek, the ordinal forms are also used for fractions for amounts higher than 2; only the fraction 1 / 2 has special forms.