Second person

In grammar, the second person is the person whom someone is speaking to or writing to. It is the person talked to. Generally, this is called grammatical person.

Effect on nouns

Very few nouns are second-person nouns because people do not usually talk directly to things like tables. In fact, in English, just about the only kind of nouns that are second-person is a small group of pronouns that can be seen in the table below.

English Personal pronouns

Person		Singular			Plural
		Subject	Object	Possessive	Subject	Object	Possessive
First		I	me	mine	we	us	ours
Second		you	you	yours	you	you	yours
Third	Female	she	her	hers	they	them	theirs
	Male	he	him	his
	No gender	it	it	its

Sometimes, a person's name is used in the second person, but that's usually just with a baby. For example, instead of saying "you sit here", one could say "Charlie sits here".

Effect on verbs

In English grammar, people do not usually have to do anything special to the verb if they use a second-person noun as a subject. In fact, the verb be is the only verb that has a special form for the second person: are. In other languages such as French though, verbs change in different ways to match the subject. In this table, tu and vous are the second-person pronouns. We can see how the verb parler (talk) changes when people use them.

	Indicative				Subjunctive		Conditional	Imperative
	Present	Simple Past	Imperfect	Simple Future	Present	Imperfect	Present	Present
je	parle	parlai	parlais	parlerai	parle	parlasse	parlerais
tu	parles	parlas	parlais	parleras	parles	parlasses	parlerais	parle
il	parle	parla	parlait	parlera	parle	parlât	parlerait
nous	parlons	parlâmes	parlions	parlerons	parlions	parlassions	parlerions	parlons
vous	parlez	parlâtes	parliez	parlerez	parliez	parlassiez	parleriez	parlez
ils	parlent	parlèrent	parlaient	parleront	parlent	parlassent	parleraient

Other pages

• Grammatical person
• First person
• Third person