Omnipresent person

Abstract

Grammatical person can be treated in two ways. The first, most frequently used, is to assign the speaker (I, ego) the central part in the study of the systems of personal pronouns and personal moods. That is understandable if it is borne in mind that the system of personal pronouns Is to enable and facilitate the interpersonal communication, in which the speaker plays the most importante role. This system is the most characteristic medium of expression of the communicative function of language, the function manifested at the level of speech — at the level of speech realization — and derives from the relation man-man. The other view of the grammatical person gives priority to the third person, the person spoken of. This view of the person derives from the relation man-universe, the relation upon which it is built as a system of symbols serving to organize our experience of the universe, where the cognitive function of laguage derives from. It is relatively easy nowadays to prove that the third person is always hidden behind the persons of the dialogue (l. you). This is demonstrated not only by certain linguistic observations but also by literary-critical analyses of biographies. This third person, hidden in all persons of the verb is equal to the nominal person, hidden and neutralized in the substantive. The morphology ol Franch reveals this fact in an unusually clear manner. That is, both the article (le, la) which is the formal mark of the grammatical features of the substantive, and the pronoun of the third person (il), derive from the same Latin source (ille, ilia, Mud). This fact is of great importance if it is remem- bered that the verb always agrees with the substantive in this person, and that the basic syntactic connection SN-SV is still unexplained. In the opinion oT the author, the category of person is the necessary support Cor the understanding of the basic units of language (the substantive and the verb) and the locus where they meet, concord. The person is also the necessary support for the construction of the basic unit of speech, the sentence, and the pivot of the mechanism of the transfer from speech to language. In this way the person is implicit both in the cognitive and in the communicative function of laguage.