PERSON

PERSON

DEFINITION: A person is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of property, or legal responsibility.

In addition to the question of person hood, of what makes a being count as a person to begin with, there are further questions about personal identity and self: both about what makes any particular person that particular person instead of another, and about what makes a person at one time the same person as they were or will be at another time despite any intervening changes.

The criteria for being a person... are designed to capture those attributes which are the subject of our most humane concern with ourselves and the source of what we regard as most important and most problematical in our lives.

Various debates have focused on questions about the person hood of different classes of entities. Historically, the person hood of animals, women, and slaves has been a catalyst of social upheaval. In most societies today, living adult humans are usually considered persons, but depending on the context, theory or definition, the category of "person" may be taken to include or not children or such non-human entities as animals, artificial intelligence, or extraterrestrial life, as well as legal entities such as corporations, sovereign states and other polities, or estates in probate.

What does it take for individuals to persist from moment to moment – or in other words, for the same individual to exist at different moments?

Personal identity is the unique identity of persons through time. That is to say, the necessary and sufficient conditions under which a person at one time and a person at another time can be said to be the same person, persisting through time. In the modern philosophy of mind, this concept of personal identity is sometimes referred to as the chronic problem of personal identity. The syn chronic problem is grounded in the question of what features or traits characterize a given person at one time.

Three types of person in English grammar:

                                                                             

·         First person is the I/we perspective.

·         Second person is the you perspective.

·         Third person is the he/she/it/they perspective.

First, second, and third person are ways of describing points of view.

First-Person Point of View

When we talk about ourselves, our opinions, and the things that happen to us, we generally speak in the first person. The biggest clue that a sentence is written in the first person is the use of first-person pronouns. In the first sentence of this paragraph, the pronouns appear in bold text. We, us, our, and ourselves are all first-person pronouns. Specifically, they are plural first-person pronouns. Singular first-person pronouns include I, me, my, mine and myself.

I think I lost my wallet! I can’t find it anywhere! Oh, I could just kick myself!

We could do ourselves a favor and make a reservation for our group.

Many stories and novels are written in the first-person point of view. In this kind of narrative, you are inside a character’s head, watching the story unfold through that character’s eyes.

When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold.

Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

Here’s a tip:  Grammar runs on powerful algorithms developed by the world’s leading linguists, and it can save you from misspellings, hundreds of types of grammatical and punctuation mistakes, and words that are spelled right but used in the wrong context.

Second-Person Point of View

The second-person point of view belongs to the person (or people) being addressed. This is the “you” perspective. Once again, the biggest indicator of the second person is the use of second-person pronouns: you, your, yours, yourself, yourselves.

You can wait in here and make yourself at home.

You should be proud of yourselves for finishing this enormous project!

Stories and novels written in the second person exist, but they are much rarer than narratives written from a first- or third-person perspective.

You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy.

Jay Mcinerney, Bright Lights, Big City

Third-Person Point of View

The third-person point of view belongs to the person (or people) being talked about. The third-person pronouns include he, him, his, himself, she, her, hers, herself, it, its, itself, they, them, their, theirs, and themselves.

Tiffany used her prize money from the science fair to buy herself a new microscope.

The concert goers roared their approval when they realized they’d be getting an encore.

You can’t always rely on pronouns to tell you the perspective of a sentence. Not all sentences include pronouns, especially in the third person:

Mike always hated school.

But if you look at this sentence and think “Mike isn’t me,” you can eliminate the first person. You can also think “I’m not talking to Mike,” so that eliminates the second person. You’re left with the third person.

Plenty of stories and novels are written in the third person. In this type of story, a disembodied narrator describes what the characters do and what happens to them. You don’t see directly through a character’s eyes as you do in a first-person narrative, but often the narrator describes the main character’s thoughts and feelings about what’s going on.

Sam Vimes sighed when he heard the scream, but he finished shaving before he did anything about it.

Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

Speaking in the Third Person

Most of the time when people talk about themselves, they speak in the first person. It would certainly be eccentric to talk about yourself in the third person all the time, but you may do it once in a while for comedic effect or to grab someone’s attention.

Tina: Let’s get sushi for lunch. It’s Jeff’s favorite! Tom: No, Jeff hates sushi. I think he’d rather get burritos. Jeff: Um, does Jeff get a vote?

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