2 The person category

The category of person encodes the semantic distinction between discourse roles. It is typically expressed on pronouns and verbs, while nouns are generally assumed to have an inherent third person value (Corbett 2006a). In Part I of this book, I will focus on the expression of person in personal pronouns only.6

The goal of this chapter is to present the most common distinctions drawn within the person category in the world’s (spoken) languages. Since cross-linguistic studies only very rarely discuss the person distinctions encoded in sign language grammars, I will tackle this issue in the second part of the chapter.

In sign languages, reference to the participants in the speech act is deeply connected with the use of the signing space, but accounts of the association between spatial locations and referents are far from uniform. This translates into different analyses of the person category, as well as into diverging proposals regarding the number of person values claimed to be grammatically encoded in sign language grammars.

This chapter is organized as follows. Section 2.1 introduces the notion of pronominal person, the most common distinctions drawn in the person category and their relation to the number category. Section 2.2 offers an overview of the cross-linguistic tendencies observed in the category of person in the world’s (spoken) languages. In Section 2.3, I turn to sign languages and report on the main proposals that account for the association of spatial location and referents, as well as for the expression of person distinctions in sign language pronouns.

2.1 Person distinctions

2.1.1 Participants vs. non-participants

The grammatical category of person encodes, both in the verbal and in the nominal domain, reference to the participants in the speech act. First and second person express the conversational roles of the speech act participants: first person refers (minimally) to the speaker and second person to the addressee. The nonparticipants in the speech act, in turn, are associated with third person.

The participants vs. non-participants split is based on the observation that the third person is fundamentally distinct from the first and the second (cf. Forchheimer 1953; Benveniste 1971; Lyons 1977; a.o.). According to Benveniste (1971: 217) “[…] the ordinary definition of the personal pronouns as containing the three terms I, you, and he simply destroys the notion of ‘person’. ‘Person’ belongs only to I/you and is lacking in he”. Similarly, Lyons (1977: 638) notes that “[t]he term ‘third person’ is negatively defined with respect to ‘first person’ and ‘second person’: it does not correlate with any positive participant role”. This is why third person is also referred as ‘the non-person’, ‘third party’ or ‘the other category’ (Benveniste 1971; Cysouw 2001; Siewierska 2004; a.o.).

The first/second vs. third person distinction is borne out by considering both semantic and morphosyntactic evidence. For example, third person pronouns are more likely to show gender distinctions than first and second person pronouns. Number distinctions, by contrast, are more commonly neutralized in the third person (see Sections 2.2 and 7.4.2). Besides, some languages lack dedicated markers to express reference to the non-participants, which may translate into absence of specialized third person pronouns or into zero verbal agreement. For instance, the Nakho-Daghestanian language Lezgian, spoken in the Caucasus, uses the substantivized demonstrative am (‘that one’) instead of a third person pronoun, as illustrated in (3). Alternatively, languages may express reference to the nonparticipant by using full noun phrases or zero forms (i.e., no overt expression whatsoever) (Siewierska 2004).7

Zero agreement in the third person is fairly common in the world’s languages, unlike zero agreement in first and second person (Cysouw 2001). This is the case of the Mongolian language Buriat in (4). In the singular, overt agreement suffixes, which are derived from personal pronouns, are used in first and second person. Absence of a person suffix, in turn, is associated with reference to the non-participant. In the plural, the third person suffix is derived from the demonstrative ede (‘these’).

An additional distinction between first and second person pronouns as opposed to the third is that the former are inherently deictic elements and, as such, their interpretation shifts with the speaker (i.e., they belong to the class of ‘shifters’, cf. Jespersen 1922; Jakobson 1971). By contrast, third person pronouns may have both indexical (i.e., deictic) and non-indexical (i.e., anaphoric) uses (Kaplan 1989).8The interpretation of anaphoric third person pronouns does not shift, as they are bound to their antecedents, not to the extralinguistic context.9

Notationally, the reference of person is labeled using either Arabic numbers (1 for speaker, 2 for addressee, 3 for other; cf. Zwicky 1977) or, in the tradition of Harbour (2016) and Ackema & Neeleman (2018), using letters (i for speaker, u for addressee, o for other). Here, I will follow the more widespread convention of representing the...