Personnumberrelated

Personnumberrelated is a term used in linguistics to denote phenomena that involve person and number features in grammatical systems. It concerns how verbs, pronouns, and related elements encode or agree with subjects or other arguments for person (first, second, third) and number (singular, plural; some languages include dual, trial, or more). The concept is central to studies of morphology, syntax, and language typology.

In morphology, these features are often shown through affixes or stem changes on verbs and agreement markers on nouns or adjectives. In syntax, agreement constraints require a matching person-number value between a finite verb and its subject. In semantics, person-number information can influence discourse interpretation, such as formality or inclusivity distinctions.

Cross-linguistic variation includes languages with a dual number, inclusive versus exclusive first-person plural, and politeness-based person forms. Some languages mark person-number on verbs, others primarily on pronouns or nouns, and some use a combination. English, for example, has visible subject-verb agreement in the present tense (I am, you are, he is), while other languages show richer or more complex systems.

In linguistic theory and natural language processing, person-number features are often represented in feature geometry or attribute-value matrices, guiding agreement, pronoun resolution, and morphological generation. The label personnumberrelated is a descriptive shorthand used to discuss this family of phenomena across languages.

See also: grammatical person, grammatical number, subject-verb agreement, inclusive/exclusive distinction, dual number.