Person: person
Person is typically feature of personal and possessive pronouns / determiners, and of verbs. On verbs it is in fact an agreement feature that marks the person of the verb’s subject (some languages, e.g. Basque, can also mark person of objects). Person marked on verbs makes it unnecessary to always add a personal pronoun as subject and thus subjects are sometimes dropped (pro-drop languages).
1: first person
In singular, the first person refers just to the speaker / author. In plural, it must include the speaker and one or more additional persons. Some languages (e.g. Taiwanese) distinguish inclusive and exclusive 1st person plural pronouns: the former include the addressee of the utterance (i.e. I + you), the latter exclude them (i.e. I + they).
Examples
- [en] I, we
- [cs] dělám “I do”
2: second person
In singular, the second person refers to the addressee of the utterance / text. In plural, it may mean several addressees and optionally some third persons too.
Examples
- [en] you
- [cs] děláš “you do”
3: third person
The third person refers to one or more persons that are neither speakers nor addressees.
Examples
- [en] he, she, it, they
- [cs] dělá “he/she/it does”
Person in other languages: [bg] [cs] [de] [el] [en] [es] [eu] [fa] [fi] [fr] [ga] [he] [hu] [it] [ja] [ko] [sv] [u]