pluralhave

Pluralhave is a term used in linguistics to describe a hypothetical morphosyntactic pattern in which the verb have bears a plural marking to signal joint possession or collective agency. The idea arises in discussions of how languages encode possession and plurality, and it is not an established feature of standard English.

In the proposed analysis, pluralhave could appear as a fused or cliticized form on the auxiliary have, marking that multiple subjects own or hold an object. An illustrative (hypothetical) sentence in a speculative dialect might read “they pluralhave the keys” to indicate that several people jointly possess the keys, as opposed to a simple “they have the keys” or “the team has the keys.” The form would operate independently of the usual noun-phase plural marking and would align more closely with joint possession semantics.

Current usage in scholarly literature is limited to theoretical discussion and cross-linguistic comparison. Some researchers treat pluralhave as a thought experiment illustrating how possession could be encoded morphosyntactically, while others argue that existing mechanisms (possession nouns, ditransitives, or cliticization) already capture joint possession without new verb morphology. The term remains debated and not widely adopted.

See also: possession, verb agreement, clitic, joint possession, grammar.