personnumbertense

Personnumbertense is a proposed morphosyntactic concept describing a single verbal marker that encodes the person and number of the subject together with the tense of the event. The term is used to discuss languages or theoretical frameworks in which these three grammatical dimensions are fused rather than expressed by separate, independent systems for person, number, and tense.

In data from natural languages, person, number, and tense are often marked separately, or person and number are negotiated through subject-verb agreement while tense is marked on the verb or via auxiliary verbs. In systems described as exhibiting personnumbertense, a single affix, clitic, or syllable carries information about who is involved (first, second, or third person), how many participants (singular or plural), and when the action occurs (past, present, future). Such markers can be synthetic (a single bound morpheme) or analytic (a clitic or particle that attaches to the verb) and may interact with aspect or mood in complex ways.

Typologically, genuine instances are argued to be relatively rare and are often discussed as the result of historical fusion or reanalysis of previously separate markers. The phenomenon is of interest in theories of morphophonology, syntax-semantics interfaces, and language change, where diachronic pathways might reduce multiple markers to a compact, unified form.

Illustrative examples are commonly constructed in linguistic demonstrations to show how a single marking could jointly signal person, number, and tense. For example, in a hypothetical language, a verb root ban- plus a suffix such as -ni might encode 1st person singular past (ban-ni = I saw), while the same root with different suffixes encodes other person-number-tense combinations. These examples are schematic and not drawn from attested languages. See also: verb morphology, subject-verb agreement, tense.