Theme: major parameters of the typological category

4. THE TYPOLOGICAL CATEGORY OF PERSONALITY
The category of personality should be dealt in close connection with the category of number (plurality) in English and Russian languages, because in the languages of Indo-European family these categories are usually expressed by one and the same morpheme simultaneously.
In compared languages the category of personality is a characteristic feature for pronouns and verbs. The compared languages make distinction between the three classes of personal pronouns denoting respectively the person(s) spoken to (the sec­ond person) and the person(s) (or things) spoken about (the third person).
singular plural

1. 
   ) person - the speaker, the speaker and some other people;
   
2. 
   )person - a person spoken to, more than one people spoken to;
   
3. 
   ) person - a person or a thing spoken about, some people or things spoken about.
   

The category of personality in verbs is represented by the I st, 2nd, 3rd person and it expresses the relations between the speaker, the person or people spoken to and other person or people spoken about. However this system doesn't hold good for the modern English verb for two reasons:
1) There is no distinction of persons in the plural number. Thus the form "live"
may within the plural number be connected with a subject of any person e.g.
We live.
2) There is no distinction of numbers in the 1st and 2nd persons. Thus, the form
«live» in these persons may refer to both one and more than one subjects. Thus the
opposition of all other persons expresses relations of the 3rd person with any person
of both numbers.
The marked member of the opposition differs greatly from that of unmarked one in the form and in the meaning. It should be kept in mind that in the Subjunctive mood of the form «live» denotes any person of both numbers. There is a special subclass of the English verbs which do not fit into the system of person and number described above and they must be treated separately both in a practical study of the language and in theoretical analysis. They are called modal verbs 'can, may, must' etc. Being defective verbs they do not admit any suffix to their stem and do not denote any person or number and usually accompany the no­tional verbs in speech giving them additional meanings of notions as ability permis­sion, necessity or obligation etc.The morphological level units have explicit markers of personality, i.e. special affixes with the grammatical meaning of personality. The category of personality can be also found on other level of hierarchy: lexical and syntactic.
The meaning of personality can be expressed by the implicitly of the lexical meaning of some lexical-grammatical classes of words.
The so called “editorial we” (Lat. plural is modestial) is well for instance, as used in many modern languages by authors of scientific papers, monographs or articles in newspapers, etc. The pronoun “we” is commonly used in proverbs, e.g.: