We've adjusted the labelling for the paradigm below, to better capture the proportionalities involved. Instead of using traditional PERSON and NUMBER labels we've turned to discourse semantics, and chosen more transparent terms to capture what is going on. One problem with this for some linguists is that our labels now sound more contextual than grammatical, and formal grammarians might object to them on such grounds; and they are perhaps less familiar to linguists than the traditional ones, and so outsiders might find them harder to understand. …
… there is a system of PERSON, based (in English, as in most other languages) on the opposition of ‘you-&-me’ versus ‘everyone (and perhaps everything) else’, and then on that of ‘you’ as opposed to ‘me’ (see Figure 2-2). …
On the other hand, the NUMBER categories are derived from Martin's source, Schachter & Otanes (1972: 88), not Martin's discourse semantics:
The plural pronouns have, as a group, the meanings of the corresponding non-plural pronouns with the additional meaning 'and others' (or 'and another'): thus the first-person plural is literally 'I and others', the dual plural 'you (singular) and I and others', etc.
[2] To be clear, the claim here is that a problem with more transparent terms is that they might be harder to understand.
[3] Trivially, in SFL Theory, 'context' is the culture modelled as a semiotic system, and formal grammarians do not use 'context' in this sense, so the labels that Martin has falsely claimed to be his own would not look more 'contextual' to them, and so would not be their grounds for objecting to them.
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