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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).
first-person pronouns normally refer to the speaker, in the case of the singular (as the English I), or to the speaker and others, in the case of the plural (as the English we). second-person pronouns normally refer to the person or persons being addressed (as the English you); in the plural they may also refer to the person or persons being ...
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 ...
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 ...
The first- and second-person pronouns are the same for all genders. They also have special dual forms , which are only used for groups of two things, as in "we both" and "you two." The dual forms are common, but the ordinary plural forms can always be used instead when the meaning is clear.
The inclusive form is derived from the second-person pronoun and the first-person pronoun. The exclusive form is derived from the first-person singular and the third-person plural. There are significant dialectal and diachronic variations in the exclusive form. English creole: Lakota: uŋ(k)- uŋ(k)- ... -pi Neither The inclusive form has a ...
Old English had a first-person pronoun that inflected for four cases and three numbers. I originates from Old English (OE) ic, which had in turn originated from the continuation of Proto-Germanic *ik, and ek; [3] the asterisk denotes an unattested form, but ek was attested in the Elder Futhark inscriptions (in some cases notably showing the variant eka; see also ek erilaz).
In the second person, the imperative mood is normally expressed with the base form of the verb but without a subject: Take this outside! Be good! It is possible to add the second person pronoun you for emphasis: You be good! The first person plural is normally expressed with the contraction let's (let us) and the base form.