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Re: Fourth Person

From:Sally Caves <scaves@...>
Date:Monday, October 5, 1998, 0:58
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! ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 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." ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++