Teforms

Teforms are a class of grammatical forms described in some linguistic theories to encode multiple grammatical categories within a single verbal unit. The concept is used to explain how certain languages combine tense, aspect, mood, evidentiality, and polarity into compact morphologies, often in agglutinative or fusional systems. In this usage, a teform serves as a dominant verb-marking unit that signals a speaker’s stance toward the event, its temporal location, and the evidential source of information.

Morphology and typology often place teforms in suffixal or infixed positions attached to a verb stem. In many accounts, teforms are generated by stacking marker morphemes in a fixed order, with phonological processes such as vowel harmony or stem alternations shaping the surface form. The resulting teform can simultaneously convey temporal reference (past, present, future), aspect (perfective, imperfective), mood (indicative, subjunctive), and evidentiality (direct knowledge, reported information, inference). Some theories also allow teforms to absorb negation or modality within the same domain.

Function and use are typically observed in narrative and reported speech, where teforms help distinguish levels of certainty and source of information. While cross-linguistic evidence for a universal teform system is debated, the construct provides a useful analytic tool for describing languages with rich, multi-layered verbal inflection and for comparing how different languages bundle grammatical meaning into verb forms.

See also: mood, tense and aspect, evidentiality, morphological typology, agglutinative languages.