You: second or third person in the speech?

the pronoun you leads us to a relevant discussion about grammatical postulates: would it belong to the second or to the third person of the speech? Upon such inquiry, we will distinguish two basic aspects: one concerns the person of the discourse and the other refers to the grammatical person.

The so-called people of speech are defined by their position in relation to the communicative act, that is: first, representing the one who speaks (me/us); second, representing the one to whom one speaks (you/you/you, the master); and the third, demarcated by the one who is spoken of (he/them/she/they). Like realized (or would it be like did you realize?), the pronoun “you” portrays one of the options that the Portuguese language offers to designate the person we are talking to, therefore it integrates the so-called “second indirect person”. But why?

Let's go back to the use of the verbs “perceived” and “perceived”, highlighted in the previous paragraph. They will lead us to the second aspect of our discussion: grammatical people. They, in turn, indicate which verb inflection we will use, since for each person there is a corresponding verb form. Therefore, let us analyze:

you got it – such a verb form fits the second grammatical person, that is, “you”. Unlike what happens in:

You noticed – we found that even in the case of the second person of the speech, it was assigned a verbal form belonging to the third grammatical person – “perceived”.

In this way, if we say "you have noticed that your time is running out", it is similar to the same way as if we were referring to a treatment pronoun, that is, “Your Excellency has realized that your time is counted?”.

Here is the big difference that prevails in this relevant linguistic impasse!


By Vânia Duarte
Graduated in Letters

Source: Brazil School - https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/gramatica/voce-segunda-ou-terceira-pessoa-discurso.htm

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