personstemme

Personstemme is a linguistic term used to describe how some languages encode the person of the subject within the finite form of the verb. The category covers person (first, second, third) and often number (singular, plural), and is realized through inflectional endings, clitics, or periphrastic constructions. In languages with a strong personstemme system, the verb form carries information about who performs the action, and subject pronouns may be optional or redundant.

The phenomenon is a type of subject-verb agreement, where the verb agrees with its subject in person and number. Languages differ in how overt this marking is: some mark person directly on the verb, others rely mainly on subject pronouns, and still others employ a mix of verbal inflection and pronouns. Realization can be purely suffixal, involve clitics attached to the verb, or be distributed across auxiliary and main verb forms.

Examples across languages illustrate the concept. In Romance languages, verbs show person and number endings in many tenses (Italian parlo, parli, parla; Spanish hablo, hablas, habla). In languages with pronominal subjects, such as French or English, the verb form is often less explicitly differentiated by person, with pronouns bearing a larger portion of the person information.

Personstemme is distinct from voice, which concerns the relation between the participant and the action (active vs passive). It is also related to general subject-verb agreement and grammatical person.