Personformregler

Personformregler (literally “person-form rules”) is a term used in linguistic descriptions to refer to the rules that determine how verb and pronoun forms reflect the grammatical person (first, second, third) and number (singular, plural) of the subject. These rules shape how a language marks agreement between the subject and its predicate and, in some cases, how pronouns are chosen for different grammatical roles.

Across languages, personformregler vary in how explicitly they mark person. In many Romance languages, verb endings encode both person and number (for example, hablo, hablas, habla in Spanish). In English, present-tense verbs show limited person agreement (the third person singular adds -s, as in walks), while other forms do not change with person; auxiliary verbs also participate in agreement patterns (is/are, has/have). Some languages, such as Swedish, use a single present-tense form for all persons, while pronouns carry the person information. Other languages, including Mandarin Chinese, have little or no finite-verb agreement, relying more on pronouns, adverbs, or context to convey person information.

Personformregler interact with broader grammar, including tense, aspect, and mood, and may involve irregular forms, suppletion, or syntax-specific restrictions. They are a central area of study in grammar descriptions, language teaching, and natural language processing, where accurately modeling person and number agreement improves parsing, generation, and understanding of sentences.

In summary, personformregler describe how languages encode who is performing an action and how many such performers there are, through verb inflection and pronoun selection, with wide variation across linguistic typology.