third person
34
2.9
- noun
- /θɜrd ˈpɜrsən/
- Specialized
:
tercera persona
- So I've heard this person talk in third person on multiple occasions.
- third-person pronouns
- third-person singular
- third-person singular -s
I don't mean to talk about myself in third person, but it was called it was.
- I don't mean to talk about myself in third person, but it was called it was.
- We're talking about herself in a third person.
Examples
-
"What can Reggie do for you today?" Reggie always referred to himself in the third person.
Fiction book (2002) -
Did he just refer to himself in the third person?
-
Then the third person says both plus a new name.
-
This is the third person.
-
Keep talking about me in third person.
-
Are you gonna refer to yourself in the third person?
-
I like the fact they refer to themselves in the third person.
-
She would refer to herself in the third person.
-
Why do you think Carver chose to use the third-person point of view?
Fiction book (1999) -
When he talks about himself, he often uses the third person to sound more formal.
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'the grammatical category referring to someone or something other than the speaker or addressee' is directly and compositionally derived from 'third' (ordinal number three in sequence) plus 'person' (a grammatical category). This is a common cross-linguistic grammatical label and follows straightforward English noun phrase composition, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents will readily infer the MWE meaning.
Etymology
Third person comes from simply counting people in a sentence: imagine three people — first is 'I', second is 'you', and third is someone else. So, 'third person' is the way we talk about someone or something that is not the speaker or the person being spoken to.