conjugation - Does English have "plural" verb forms?

A friend of mine and I were having a linguistics argument (actually, this one), and she brought up as evidence the "plural versus singular conjugation" of the past-tense form of "to be", i.e. "was/were".

I'm sure we all know the 6-form conjugation table:

• I [verb]


• You (s.) [verb]


• He/She/One/It [verb]


• We [verb]


• You (pl.) [verb]


• They [verb]

I'm equally sure we all know that the first three are singular, and the latter three are plural. Now, interestingly, we both agreed on the answer to the original question ("Yes"), but my friend put forth as evidence that You (s.) is conjugated with the "plural conjugation", namely "were", just like We and They, whereas I and He/She/One/It are conjugated with the "singular conjugation", "was".

My argument was that verbs are not conjugated in plural and singular forms, and the fact that "to be" in many tenses seems to follow that pattern is just a coincidence, an artifact of its highly irregular nature.

So, which of us is "right"? Do verbs have explicitly "plural" versus "singular" conjugations, or do they simply have the 6 conjugations (per tense), and "to be" just happens to look like "plural" versus "singular" by mere coincidence?

Answer

Do verbs have explicitly "plural" versus "singular" conjugations, or do they simply have the 6 conjugations (per tense), and "to be" just happens to look like "plural" versus "singular" by mere coincidence?

I'd say that you are right. English verbs have, in principle, six forms, though the maximal number of distinct forms is four, and that only for the present tense of to be. The verb form is entirely determined by the subject. The fact that the subject pronoun you can be both singular or plural doesn't change this at all: you always requires the same verb agreement.

BTW, you can demonstrate that the English "singular" conjugation is in fact not a unitary conjugation by throwing back in the old 2sg thou:

I am, thou art, he is

I was, thou wast, he was

I say, thou sayest, he says

The 1sg and the 3sg are only the same in a few verbs and tenses, and the old 2sg is always different from both of them. The plural forms of we/you/they are always the same for all verbs in all tenses, so as far as that goes it's reasonable to talk about a "plural" verb form. But there is no one "singular" verb form.