Within linguistics, obviative (abbreviated ) third person is a grammatical-person marking that distinguishes a referent that is less important to the discourse from one that is more important (proximate). The obviative is sometimes referred to as the "fourth person".
Within linguistics, obviative (abbreviated ) third person is a grammatical-person marking that distinguishes a referent that is less important to the discourse from one that is more important (proximate). The obviative is sometimes referred to as the "fourth person".
== Comparison with other grammatical-person marking systems == In English and many other European languages, the principal means of distinguishing between multiple third-person referents is using gender or (lack of) reflexive. Thus, in "she saw him", it is clear that there are two third persons because they are of different genders. In "she saw her", it is clear that there are two third persons because otherwise, one would say "she saw herself". However, "she saw her dog" is ambiguous: it could mean that she saw her own dog or that she saw someone else's dog. This is because it is not clear, in some contexts, if "she" and "her" refer to the same person.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).