nonperson

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English

Etymology

non- +‎ person

Pronunciation

  • IPA(key): /ˈnɒnpɜː(ɹ)sən/

Noun

nonperson (plural nonpersons or nonpeople)

  1. Not a real person; a subhuman.
    • 1989, Michael C. Kearl, Endings: A Sociology of Death and Dying, page 146:
      As all lives must end, do you prefer to die as a nonperson, forgotten in a nursing home and totally stripped of dignity and independence?
    • 1994, Lisa J. McIntyre, Law in the Sociological Enterprise, page 92:
      Arguably, what is so hateful about a hate crime is that it is an attempt by some individual or group to treat a Person as a Nonperson.
    • 1998, John E. Tropman, Does America Hate the Poor?, page 6:
      How does hate work? [...] One answer is that the poor person (or the Jew, or the Asian, or the Native American, or whoever) becomes, intellectually, linguistically, and emotionally, a "lessperson," and then a nonperson.
  2. Not a legal entity.
  3. Something other than a person; an object.
    • 1995, Roger K. R. Thompson, “Natural and Relational Concepts in Animals”, in Comparative Approaches to Cognitive Science, page 179:
      Taken together, all the results suggested that discrimination of person from nonperson slides was not controlled by an obvious single stimulus feature.
    • 2001, Eric T. Olson, “A Compound of Two Substances”, in Soul, Body, and Survival, page 77:
      No nonperson is psychologically indistinguishable from you.
    • 2002, Ritva Laury, “Interaction, grounding, and third-person referential forms”, in Frank Brisard, editor, Grounding: The Epistemic Footing of Deixis and Reference, page 85:
      For example, Benveniste [...] discusses the connection of first- and second-person pronouns with the speech situation, and even goes as far as to claim that the third person is a nonperson, since the referents of third-person pronouns are not speech-act participants.

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