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62
As we see, the category of person taken as a whole is, as it were, inherently linguistic, the significative
purpose of it being confined to indications centering around the production of speech.
Let us now appraise the category of number represented in the forms of personal pronouns, i.e. the lexemic
units of language specially destined to serve the speaker-listener lingual relation.
One does not have to make great exploratory efforts in order to realize that the grammatical number of the
personal pronouns is extremely peculiar, in no wise resembling the number of ordinary substantive words. As a
matter of fact, the number of a substantive normally expresses either the singularity or plurality of its referent
("one - more than one", or, in oppositional appraisal, "plural - non-plural"), the quality of the referents, as a
rule, not being re-interpreted with the change of the number (the many exceptions to this rule lie beyond the
purpose of our present discussion). For instance, when speaking about a few powder-compacts, I have in mind
just several pieces of them of absolutely the same nature. Or when referring to a team of eleven football-
players, I mean exactly so many members of this sporting group. With the personal pronouns, though, it is
different, and the cardinal feature of the difference is the heterogeneity of the plural personal pronominal
meaning.
Indeed, the first person plural does not indicate the plurality of the "ego", it cannot mean several I’s. What it
denotes in fact, is the speaker plus some other person or persons belonging, from the point of view of the
utterance content, to the same background. The second person plural is essentially different from the first
person plural in so far as it does not necessarily express, but is only capable of expressing similar semantics.
Thus, it denotes either more than one listener (and this is the ordinary, general meaning of the plural as such,
not represented in the first person); or, similar to the first person, one actual listener plus some other person or
persons belonging to the same background in the speaker's situational estimation; or, again specifically
different from the first person, more than one actual listener plus some other person or persons of the corre-
sponding interpretation. Turning to the third person plural, one might feel inclined to think that it would wholly
coincide with the plural of an ordinary substantive name. On closer observation, however, we note a
fundamental difference here also. Indeed, the plural of the third person is not the substantive plural proper, but
the deictic, indicative, pronominal plural; it is expressed through the intermediary reference to the direct name
of the denoted entity, and so may either be related to the singular he-pronoun, or the she-pronom, or the
it - pronoun, or to any possible combination of them according to the nature of the plural object of denotation.
The only inference that can be made from the given description is that in the personal pronouns the
expression of the plural is very much blended with the expression of the person, and what is taken to be three
persons in the singular and plural, essentially presents a set of six different forms of blended person-number
nature, each distinguished by its own individuality. Therefore, in the strictly cate-gorial light, we have here a
system not of three, but of six persons.
Returning now to the analysed personal and numerical forms of the finite verb, the first conclusion to be
drawn on the ground of the undertaken analysis is that their intermixed character, determined on the formal
basis, answers in general the mixed character of the expression of person and number by the pronominal
subject name of the predicative construction. The second conclusion to be drawn, however, is that the
described formal person-number system of the finite verb is extremely and very singularly deficient. In fact,
what in this connection the regular verb-form does express morphemically, is only the oppositionsal
identification of the third person singular (to leave alone the particular British English mode of expressing the
person in the future).
A question naturally arises: What is the actual relevance of this deficient system in terms of the English
language? Can one point out any functional, rational significance of it, if taken by itself?
The answer to this question can evidently be only in the negative: in no wise. There cannot be any
functional relevance in such a system, if taken by itself. But in language it does not exist by itself.
§ 5. As soon as we take into consideration the functional side of the analysed forms, we discover at once
that these forms exist in unity with the personal-numerical forms of the subject. This unity is of such a nature
that the universal and true indicator of person and number of the subject of the verb will be the subject itself,
however trivial this statement may sound. Essentially, though, there is not a trace of triviality in the formula,
bearing in mind, on the one hand, the substantive character of the expressed categorial meanings, and on the
other, the analytical basis of the English grammatical structure. The combination pf the English finite verb with
the subject is obligatory not only in the general syntactic sense, but also in the categorial sense of expressing the
subject-person of the process.
An objection to this thesis can be made on the ground that in the text the actual occurrence of the subject
with the finite verb is not always observed. Moreover, the absence of the subject in constructions of living