AKA: first person, second person, third person pronouns
The first person grammatically is I (singular) or we (plural), plus their related pronouns (me, my, us, our, etc.). When a clause is in the first person, it is written from my or our perspective.
The second person is you, which is both singular and plural in English (but not all languages). When a clause is in the second person, it is written from your perspective.
There are several forms of the third person: he/him/his, she/her/hers, it/its, and they/them. If the subject of a clause is a noun or name, it is in the third person.* Clauses in the third person are written from an outside perspective: not me or you, but a third person, people, thing, or things. For this reason, the third person is sometimes considered impersonal and is a hallmark of academic texts.
Generally, the subject of the verb determines the “person” of the clause. For example:
(*There is one exception, which you might call the Elmo exception, when you refer to yourself in the third person. In TV’s Sesame Street, the muppet Elmo, who is permanently five years old, refers to himself by his own name, e.g. “Elmo likes apples.”)
Please read this excerpt from an open-access psychology textbook, specifically from the introduction to behavioral economics:
| For example, a traditional economist would say that if you lost a $10 bill today, and also received an extra $10 in your paycheck, you should feel perfectly neutral. You are the same financially as you were before. However, behavioral economists have conducted research that shows many people will feel some negative emotion, such as anger or frustration, after those two things happen. We tend to focus more on the loss than the gain. We call this loss aversion, where a $1 loss pains us 2.25 times more than a $1 gain helps us. This insight has implications for investing, as people tend to “overplay” the stock market by reacting more to losses than to gains. This behavior looks irrational to traditional economists, but is consistent once we understand better how the mind works, these economists argue. | 1. Identify some examples of first, second, and third person clauses. 2. This text is tricky because the writer uses we with different meanings. Can you identify two uses of we with different meanings? 3. Why do you think the writers chose “people tend to overplay the stock market” rather than “you tend to overplay the stock market”? | | --- | --- |
This is a good opportunity to review the system of pronouns in English:
<insert table>
You’ll notice in the table above that I have listed they/them as both singular and plural. Singular they is used in contemporary English in two contexts: to refer to a person in general without specifying gender (there’s someone at the door; they look sick); and to refer to non-binary people and people who use different pronouns in different contexts (Jan is here for their appointment; they are waiting in the lobby). The use of they as either singular or plural is fully grammatical and has been at least since the time of Shakespeare.