First person: Talking about oneself. I, me. Second person: talking about the listener. you, your. Third person: talking about someone who is not the speaker or listener. He/she/it/they Fourth person: Talking about total bullshit.
In this context, “Chat” is second-person plural, used by streamers to address the portion of their audience able to respond in the text chat that always accompanies these things. It does contrast with how a radio personality might address “listeners” because radio listeners don’t usually have a method to respond in real time, so it’s usually a rhetorical question; a streamer addressing the chat is asking for a response.
i saw someone argue for chat being a 4th person pronoun because it breaks the 4th wall usually seen in mass broadcast media, there’s still a degree of interaction that isn’t there on live TV, so “chat is this real” prompts a direct response from a unified mass of people, there’s a conversation happening through the 4th wall basically
the other person explained it better lol
Eh, I don’t think that holds up.
I might buy the 4th person as “someone outside your continuum or reality,” but I’ve yet to see a language construct specifically for that. Fictional characters invariably use second or third person to refer to the audience outside their world.
Streamers talking with their chat audience aren’t fictional or otherworldly though. I don’t see a linguistic difference between a streamer asking the chat what game he should play next, to Bob Saget saying “Home viewers, if you have a funny home video, send the tape to the address on your screen for a chance at appearing on our show!” It’s a communique addressing a large scattered audience through audio/video telephony soliciting a reply. The only real difference is round-trip latency.
While I think the phenomenon of live streaming and their audiences is interesting and presents a fairly new experience, I don’t know if it’s “we’re inventing new pronoun tenses over here.”
There are languages with a 4th person pronoun. The 3rd person is kind of the main character and the 4th someone else. That helps to disambiguate sentences like “The criminal shot the cop and drove away on his (own or the cop’s) bike”.
Or the “gay fanfiction problem”: “He looked at him and lay his hands on his lap”. Is it a happy ending or a sad one? That’s one theory why gender in pronouns is so resilient: more often than not, the gendered pronoun can disambiguate which person is talked about. It doesn’t always work, a 3rd/4rd person distinction is superior.
You can have an alternate third person pronoun I suppose in order to distinguish two third person individuals, but that doesn’t mean there’s a fourth person pronoun. The general definition is:
- first person - the speaker
- second person - the audience, whether present or not present
- third person - someone or something other than the audience
So things like “chat” and “breaking the fourth wall” are second person pronouns. There is no fourth person pronoun, because anything other than first and second is covered under third person.
I’ve looked it up and the official name is “obviative” and it is sometimes referred to as the “fourth person”.
That still sounds like a special type of third person, though I guess that’s just disagreeing about terminology.
Isn’t ‘chat’ essentially treated as a name, except that it refers to a group of people instead of an individual?
I think you’re right, and the pronoun for it would be the second person plural (you in English).
Why isn’t that just 2nd person plural, like “y’all”?
It speaks to a person that isn’t physically present and just an observer. “You” typically addresses someone directly, but can be used to break the 4th wall and talk to observers. “Chat” is exclusively for breaking the 4th wall.
Nah, “chat” is talking to a specific, present group of people, and is used in lieu of writing a text chat. It’s not like a film actor speaking to the audience, who has no way of responding. Even so, any terms used in breaking the fourth wall would still be second person, ability to respond and presence aren’t a requirement here (e.g. you’d use “you” in letters, and the reader is absolutely not present).
Chat, I’ve found more youthspeak that I can use incorrectly and be cringe.
Skibidi!
You are wrong on both counts.
I just addressed “you”, even though you’re not physically present, so clearly that’s not a requirement of second person usage, not to mention that presumably this child saying “chat” is being heard by people physically nearby in this example.
In order to break the fourth wall, the speaker must be part of the media. In the instance of streamers talking to their fans, it’s clearly meant to be an interactive experience between streamer and host, consuming the same media (albeit in different ways). They’re asking a question and getting a response which informs their actions.
Fundamentally, it’s no different than when my wife asks “did that wizard just cast fireball?” while she sits on the couch watching me playing Skyrim.
You are wrong
I don’t think it’s accurate to call the barrier between a streamer and their audience “the fourth wall”. The fourth wall is a concept that exists in theater, and then more largely in fiction, where characters exist in a world where they do not know that they’re characters in a story. And the fourth wall breaks when they realize that they are.
If “chat” breaks the fourth wall, then self-help books that use “you” are too, or news anchors addressing their viewers, or politicians saying “my fellow countrymen” in a broadcast address.
Now that is an interesting distinction to make. I suppose that the 4th wall didn’t exist throughout most of history (with the exception of theatre) and so there wasn’t much reason for this feature of language to develop
Is it really that different than saying “Audience”? Or radio shows referring to “listeners”? Etc.
Or “y’all”
Saying “chat” to address a group or room full of people isn’t different at all from addressing them as “y’all”
Seems like the same thing to me. I think the person saying it’s the first of its kind is wrong, but it would still be equally bizarre if people were addressing their “listeners” in normal conversation.
Yeah, it would be weird to say ‘listeners’ when talking to a group. But social conventions and language shifts. “chat” has established itself for pretty obvious reasons, so I’m not surprised to see it catch on in the physical world. It’s a bit like people saying ‘lol’ in person was super weird at first, but isn’t that weird any more.
Also, I don’t think it is anywhere near as weird as how politicians address what they are saying to “Mr. Speaker” when they are clearly actually not talking to that person at all.
Haha, no - we’re two different people who are both Star Trek fans and post on Lemmy a lot.
it’s definitely 2nd person collective in its original usage and outside of its original usage it’s not a pronoun because it doesn’t replace a noun.
