Obviate third person person is a grammatical person

Grammatical person

Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns...

 marking that distinguishes a non-salient (obviative) third person referent from a more salient

Salient

Salient may refer to:* See Salients, re-entrants and pockets for the battlefield feature* Salient , part of a discrete territory projecting out of the main portion, bordered by foreign territory on three sides, into which it projects...

 (proximate) third person referent in a given discourse context. The obviative is sometimes referred to as the "fourth person".

North America

Obviate/proximate distinctions are common in some indigenous language families in northern North America. Algonquian languages

Algonquian languages

The Algonquian languages also Algonkian) are a subfamily of Native American languages which includes most of the languages in the Algic language family. The name of the Algonquian language family is distinguished from the orthographically similar Algonquin dialect of the Ojibwe language, which is a...

 are perhaps best-known for obviation, but the feature also occurs in some Salishan languages

Salishan languages

The Salishan languages are a group of languages of the Pacific Northwest...

 and in the language isolate

Language isolate

A language isolate, in the absolute sense, is a natural language with no demonstrable genealogical relationship with other languages; that is, one that has not been demonstrated to descend from an ancestor common with any other language. They are in effect language families consisting of a single...

 Kutenai

Kutenai language

The Kutenai language is named after and is spoken by some of the Kootenai Native American/First Nations people who are indigenous to the area of North America that is now Montana, Idaho, and British Columbia....

, as well as in the more southern Keresan languages

Keresan languages

Keresan , also Keres , is a group of seven related languages spoken by Keres Pueblo peoples in New Mexico, U.S.A.. Each is mutually intelligible with its closest neighbors...

.

Cross-Linguistic Patterns

• Where animacy is involved, animate noun phrase
  Noun phrase
  In grammar, a noun phrase, nominal phrase, or nominal group is a phrase based on a noun, pronoun, or other noun-like word optionally accompanied by modifiers such as adjectives....
  
  s tend to be proximate, while inanimate noun phrases tend to be obviative.
• Possessors are frequently obligatorily proximate and possessees are thus obligatory obviative.
• Obviation is most common in head-marking language
  Head-marking language
  A head-marking language is one where the grammatical marks showing relations between different constituents of a phrase tend to be placed on the heads of the phrase in question, rather than the modifiers or dependents. In a noun phrase, the head is the main noun and the dependents are the...
  
  s since the obviative is useful in disambiguating otherwise unmarked nominals.
• The obviative referent seems to always be the marked form, while the proximate is unmarked.
• Obviative marking tends to apply only to the third person, though it has been attested in the second person in a handful of Nilo-Saharan languages
  Nilo-Saharan languages
  The Nilo-Saharan languages are a proposed family of African languages spoken by some 50 million people, mainly in the upper parts of the Chari and Nile rivers , including historic Nubia, north of where the two tributaries of Nile meet...
  
  .
• Proximate/Obviative assignments are preserved throughout clauses and are also often constant over longer discourse segments.

Ojibwe

The following is a typical example of obviate/proximate morphology in the Eastern dialect of the Algonquian

Algonquian languages

The Algonquian languages also Algonkian) are a subfamily of Native American languages which includes most of the languages in the Algic language family. The name of the Algonquian language family is distinguished from the orthographically similar Algonquin dialect of the Ojibwe language, which is a...

 Ojibwe language

Ojibwe language

Ojibwe , also called Anishinaabemowin, is an indigenous language of the Algonquian language family. Ojibwe is characterized by a series of dialects that have local names and frequently local writing systems...

, in which the obviative is marked on nouns and demonstratives and reflected in pronominal verb affixes:

Maaba	dash	shkinwe	wgii-bwaadaa	wii-bi-yaanid	myagi-nishnaaben	waa-bi-nsigwaajin
maaba	dash	oshkinawe	o-gii-bawaad-am-n	wii-bi-ayaa-ini-d	mayagi-nishanaabe-an	x-wii-bi-nis-igo-waa-d-in
this	EMP	young.man	3 Grammatical person Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns... -PAST Past tense The past tense is a grammatical tense that places an action or situation in the past of the current moment , or prior to some specified time that may be in the speaker's past, present, or future... -dream-3 Grammatical person Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns... INAN Animacy Animacy is a grammatical and/or semantic category of nouns based on how sentient or alive the referent of the noun in a given taxonomic scheme is... -OBV	FUT Future tense In grammar, a future tense is a verb form that marks the event described by the verb as not having happened yet, but expected to happen in the future , or to happen subsequent to some other event, whether that is past, present, or future .-Expressions of future tense:The concept of the future,... -coming-be.at-OBV-3 Grammatical person Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns...	foreign-people-OBV	REL Relativizer In linguistics, a relativizer is a grammatical element used to indicate a relative clause. Not all languages use relativizers; most Indo-European languages use relative pronouns instead, and some languages, such as Japanese, rely solely on word order to indicate relative clauses... -FUT Future tense In grammar, a future tense is a verb form that marks the event described by the verb as not having happened yet, but expected to happen in the future , or to happen subsequent to some other event, whether that is past, present, or future .-Expressions of future tense:The concept of the future,... -coming-kill-INV Inversion (linguistics) In linguistics, grammatical inversion is any of a number of different distinct grammatical constructions in the languages of the world. There are three main uses in the literature which, unfortunately, have little if any overlap either formally or typologically: syntactic inversion, thematic... -3 Grammatical person Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns... -OBV

'Then this (PROX) young man (PROX) dreamed (PROX) that foreigners (OBV) would come (OBV) to kill (OBV) them (PROX).'

Note that this example shows that the proximate referent need not necessarily be the subject of a clause.

Potawatomi

The Algonquian

Algonquian languages

The Algonquian languages also Algonkian) are a subfamily of Native American languages which includes most of the languages in the Algic language family. The name of the Algonquian language family is distinguished from the orthographically similar Algonquin dialect of the Ojibwe language, which is a...

 Potawatomi language

Potawatomi language

Potawatomi is a Central Algonquian language and is spoken around the Great Lakes in Michigan and Wisconsin, as well as in Kansas in the United States, and in southern Ontario in Canada, 1300 Potawatomi people, all elderly...

 is notable for having two "degrees" of obviation. As is seen in the following example, a "further obviative" referent deemed even less salient than the obviative referent can be marked by reduplication

Reduplication

Reduplication in linguistics is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word is repeated exactly or with a slight change....

 of the obviative suffix:

waposo	waposo-n	waposo-n-un
rabbit	rabbit-OBV	rabbit-OBV-OBV
/proximate/	/obviative/	/further obviative/

Ingush

Obviation in the Ingush language

Ingush language

Ingush is a language spoken by about 413,000 people , known as the Ingush, across a region covering Ingushetia, Chechnya, Kazakhstan and Russia. In Ingush, the language is called ГІалгІай Ğalğaj .-Classification:...

, a heavily dependent-marking language

Dependent-marking language

A dependent-marking language is one where the grammatical marks showing relations between different constituents of a phrase tend to be placed on the dependents or modifiers, rather than the heads of the phrase in question. In a noun phrase, the head is the main noun and the dependents are the...

, is an exception to the generalization that the obviative occurs in head-marking language

Head-marking language

A head-marking language is one where the grammatical marks showing relations between different constituents of a phrase tend to be placed on the heads of the phrase in question, rather than the modifiers or dependents. In a noun phrase, the head is the main noun and the dependents are the...

s. Obviation is not overtly marked in Ingush, but is implied by the fact that certain constructions are only possible when one referent has salience over another.

For example, if a non-subject-referent has salience over the subject and precedes the other co-referent, reflexivization (normally used only when there is a coreferent to the subject) is possible. This is shown in the example below where the non-subject-referent appears to have salience over the subject:

Muusaajna	shii	zhwalii	t'y-weaxar
Musa-DAT	3 Grammatical person Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns... S Grammatical number In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions .... -RFL Reflexive Reflexive may refer to:In fiction:*MetafictionIn grammar:*Reflexive pronoun, a pronoun with a reflexive relationship with its self-identical antecedent*Reflexive verb, where a semantic agent and patient are the same... -GEN	dog	on-bark-WITNESSED Evidentiality In linguistics, evidentiality is, broadly, the indication of the nature of evidence for a given statement; that is, whether evidence exists for the statement and/or what kind of evidence exists. An evidential is the particular grammatical element that indicates evidentiality...  PAST Past tense The past tense is a grammatical tense that places an action or situation in the past of the current moment , or prior to some specified time that may be in the speaker's past, present, or future...

'Musa's dog barked at him.'

If the subject is salient ("proximate"), on the other hand, the subject's possessor may not antecede the third person object, and the possession must be indirectly implicated as follows:

Muusaa	siesaguo	liex
Musa	wife-ERG Ergative case The ergative case is the grammatical case that identifies the subject of a transitive verb in ergative-absolutive languages.-Characteristics:...	seek

'Musa's wife is looking for him.' (Lit. 'The wife is looking for Musa.')