Re: Fourth Person
| From: | Sally Caves <scaves@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Monday, October 5, 1998, 0:58 |
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On Sun, 4 Oct 1998, Tom Wier wrote:
> Christopher Palmer wrote:
>
> > On Sun, 4 Oct 1998, Frank George Valoczy wrote:
> >
> > > 3p = anyone else who is present
> > > 4p = anyone else who is not present
> >
> > 'Presence', like 'animacy' or any other semantic feature, relates only
> > arbitrarily to 'person-ness' (function as a speaker/hearer in the
> > discourse).
>
> But presence is the means by which we define what kind of person it
> is. Personness is, after all, only a matter of deixis: just like you can have
> more than two or three levels of physical deixis (this, that, yonder, etc.)
> you can have more than three of personal deixis (I, you, it, one, etc.).
> As you move further away from the identity of speaker and person
> being spoken of (first person), you can have any number of others.
> In practice this would only work with integers, but there's still no
> reason why there should not be some sort of metaphysical infinitely
> far personal deixis.
Tom, I really like this notion of the fourth person being "one," and
setting it up on a deictic scale. I had never thought of this, but
Teonaht pronouns (incompletely documented on my website) follow this
structure to a "tee":
NUMBER
sg. dual pl.
PERSON
first (I) I/me we two we/they
us two
second (thou) You/you you two you/you
third (specified She/her those two her/her
not present)
fourth (unspecified one/one a certain two some
not present)
What a brainstorm!
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Sally Caves
scaves@frontiernet.net
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/teonaht.html
Mr. Book: "Shut it down!"
_Dark City_
Christof: "Cue the sun!"
_The Truman Show_
Tehwo tsema brondi laz obil hea nomai pendo
"Summer like a white sword hangs over the land."
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