Re: THEORY: The fourth person

Staving Joe:

>Oh, and while we're on the subject.  Another person I've seen called
>'the fourth person', is often called the 'third person obviate'.
>Essentially, there is the proximate third person, who represents the
>main character in any given narrative or sentence(depending on the
>language), and the obviate third person, who represents the incidental
>character(s).  There's a whole section in Mithun's 'The Languages of
>Native North America' on 'fourth persons'. (Languages with the
>proximate-obviate distinction are mostly in the Algonquian family.)
Using the Japanese deixis model, we could split the third person three ways.

Third person associated with me.
Third person associated with you.
Third person associated with neither of us.

Pete