Person

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Person is an inflectional dimension used mostly on verbal predicates, possessed nouns and adpositions to denote the speech act participants speaker and hearer and their contrast with non-speech act particiants. In some languages, the dimension person is not categorized into speaker vs. hearer vs. non-speech act participants, but into what is called conjunct, locutor, informant, or epistemic source vs. other. The conjunct (locutor/informant/epistemic source) person is the speaker in statements and the addressee in questions.

Inflectional categories

See also

Origin

The term person and the names for the three main categories (first, second, third) go back to the ancient Greek grammarians.

References

  • Siewierska, Anna. 2003. Person. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Bickel, Balthasar & Nichols, Johanna. 2007. Inflectional morphology. In: Shopen, T. [ed.] "Language typology and syntactic description". Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Other languages