persontense

Persontense is a term used in linguistic literature to refer to the proposed interaction between person marking and tense marking on verbs. The term is not widely standardized and appears mainly in discussions of typology and morphosyntax that explore how person and temporal reference relate within a single verbal paradigm.

Conceptually, persontense can describe patterns where tense realization (morphology or periphrasis) varies by the person of the subject. In some descriptions, first- or second-person forms may bear different tense markers or require different temporal interpretations than third-person forms. In other accounts, tense is realized through auxiliary constructions whose choice is influenced by the person of the subject or sometimes by argument structure. The idea is to capture cross-linguistic patterns in which tense and person are not independent features but interact as a unit of inflection or grammar.

Because persontense is not a universally accepted category, many grammars treat tense and person as separate modules and prefer to analyze any observed interaction in terms of agreement, cross-linguistic morphophonology, or diachronic grammaticalization processes rather than as a dedicated persontense feature.

Further reading includes discussions on person agreement, tense, mood, aspect, and how grammatical features interact in predicate morphology. See also: person, tense, agreement, morphosyntax.