Personnumbermarked

Personnumbermarked is a descriptive label used in linguistics to denote systems in which words—most commonly verbs, adjectives, or determiners—carry morphemes that encode both grammatical person (first, second, third) and number (singular, plural, and sometimes dual). This feature is a central aspect of subject-verb agreement in many languages and can also appear in determiner-noun agreement or on auxiliary constructions.

Morphology and placement vary by language. In many well-known languages, finitary verbs bear affixes or clitics that mark the subject’s person and number, yielding forms like “I speak,” “you speak,” or “they speak.” Some languages combine person and number in a single morpheme, while others separate them into distinct markers. Agreement can be on the verb, on surrounding auxiliary verbs, or on other word classes that display concord with the subject.

Typologically, person-number marking is widespread but diverse. It is prominent in the Romance languages (where verbs agree with subject person and number), in many Bantu languages (with rich subject concord systems), and in various other language families. Some languages also distinguish inclusive versus exclusive first-person plural, adding a third dimension to the marking system. Other languages are pro-drop, relying more on pronoun ellipsis than explicit agreement. In some linguistic traditions, person-number marking is one component of a larger agreement belt that includes tense, mood, and aspect.

In research and annotation, personnumbermarked appears as a feature indicating subject agreement patterns, aiding cross-linguistic typology, historical linguistics, and natural language processing. Not all languages encode both person and number on a single unit, and some rely on separate pronouns or analytic constructions instead.