pastplural

Pastplural is a term used in linguistic discussions to describe a verb form or construction that encodes both past tense and grammatical number (plural) simultaneously. In languages exhibiting tense-number fusion, a single inflection can indicate that an event occurred in the past and that the subject is plural, rather than requiring separate markers for tense and number. Pastplural realizations can be affixes attached to the verb root (prefix, suffix, or infix), clitics on a finite verb, or agreement through an auxiliary carrying a fused form.

In natural languages, tense and agreement are often expressed with distinct morphemes, so pastplural is relatively rare and not universally recognized as a separate category. When present, it may arise in agglutinative systems where a past marker and a plural marker are combined into one morphophonological unit, or in mixed systems where a single form encodes multiple grammatical features that are otherwise expressed separately.

Pastplural can also appear in constructed languages or in typological descriptions used to discuss possible morphologies, providing a compact mechanism to convey a past event with a plural subject. The feature is typically analyzed in relation to how it interacts with person, aspect, mood, and sentence structure, and how it affects reading of tense and subject agreement across a clause.

See also: tense, aspect, mood, number, subject–verb agreement, morphological fusion, language typology.