second person
6
3.0
- noun
- /ˈsɛkənd ˈpɜrsən/
- Specialized
:
segunda persona
- You know you're the second person to save my life?
- second-person pronoun
- second-person narration
- second-person form
I wrote a test chapter in the second person on a whim and it worked and I decided to keep doing it.
- I wrote a test chapter in the second person on a whim and it worked and I decided to keep doing it.
Examples
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All this takes on a special cast because of the second-person narration.
Academic text (1994) -
No, no, 'you' is second person.
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The second person starts lacing up his boots.
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You're the second person who's told me that today.
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As Brian McHale puts it, "The second person is par excellence the sign of a relation."
Academic text (1994) -
"You're the second person this week who's told me I'm not very talkative," I say.
Fiction book (1996) -
In this story, the author addresses the reader directly using the second person by writing, 'You walk into a dark room.'
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Using the second person can make the narrative feel more immersive, as if the reader is part of the action.
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The sentence 'As you read this, you are engaging with the second person voice' clearly demonstrates how this grammatical category functions.
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly compositional: 'second' (the ordinal following first) plus 'person' (a grammatical category) yields the grammatical category referring to the person in the second position — the addressee, typically 'you'. This labeling pattern is cross-linguistically common and follows regular grammatical naming, so a learner who knows both constituents will infer the intended meaning.
Etymology
Second person comes from the simple idea of order in a conversation: the speaker is 'first' and the person being spoken to is the second person. That is why second person refers to the word 'you' and means 'the person being spoken to'.