Person and number markers in Spanish verb forms

Abstract

This article tests the claim that Spanish person and number markers are fused, hence impossible to separate. Traditional studies presume that number values cumulate in person markers, thus creating the portmanteau PN. While agreeing that number values lack their own markers, a few analyses depart from cumulation. They conflate person and number into an overarching category, which entails that there will be a single marker for them. The merit of conflation is that, by using a combinatorial system of persons to compose the values of the overarching category, it finds a means to deal with heterogeneous referentiality, a concomitant effect of pluralization. On close scrutiny, however, neither approach proves satisfactory. Cumulation leads to fictitious constructs and conflation fails to explain why pluralization affects referentiality. The alternative put forth corresponds to the third logical option: segregation. Person and number markers can be disentangled when one recognizes that, alongside monoexponence, there are alternative modes of structural-coding (i.e. nonexponence and polyexponence). The fact that pluralization induces heterogeneous referentiality is tied to deixis, which, in addition to requiring multiple elements, orders them with respect to the origo. This organization also sheds light on the relation between person and number and another grammatical category: clusivity.