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The extra categories may be termed fourth person, fifth person, etc. Such terms are not absolute but can refer, depending on context, to any of several phenomena. Some Algonquian languages and Salishan languages divide the category of third person into two parts: proximate for a more topical third person, and obviative for a less topical third ...
An obviative/proximate system has a different way of distinguishing between multiple third-person referents. When there is more than one third person named in a sentence or discourse context, the most important, salient, or topical is marked as "proximate" and any other, less salient entities are marked as "obviative".
Personal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person (as I), second person (as you), or third person (as he, she, it). Personal pronouns may also take different forms depending on number (usually singular or plural), grammatical or natural gender, case, and formality.
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.
English verbs distinguish singular from plural number in the third person present tense ("He goes" versus "They go"). Old English also contained dual grammatical numbers; Modern English retains a few residual terms reflective of dual number (such as both and neither , as opposed to all and none respectively), but they are generally considered ...
Jeffrey Lesser wrote: "While there are no linguistic categories that acknowledge hyphenated ethnicity (a third generation Brazilian of Japanese descendant remains 'Japanese' while a fourth-generation Brazilian of Lebanese descent may become a turco, an arabe, a sirio, or a sirio-libanese), in fact immigrant communities aggressively tried to negotiate a status that allowed for both Brazilian ...
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Moreover, the third-person personal pronouns, as well as interrogative and relative pronouns, were chosen according to the grammatical gender of their antecedent. Old English grammatical gender was, as in other Germanic languages , remarkably opaque: that is, one often could not know the gender of a noun by its meaning or by the form of the ...