Agreement (linguistics)


In linguistics, agreement or concord occurs when a word changes form depending on the other words to which it relates. It is an instance of inflection, and usually involves making the value of some grammatical category "agree" between varied words or parts of the sentence.
For example, in Standard English, one may say I am or he is, but not "I is" or "he am". This is because English grammar requires that the verb and its subject agree in person. The pronouns I and he are first and third person respectively, as are the verb forms am and is. The verb form must be selected so that it has the same person as the subject in contrast to notional agreement, which is based on meaning.

By category

Agreement generally involves matching the value of some grammatical category between different constituents of a sentence. Some categories that commonly trigger grammatical agreement are noted below.

Person

Agreement based on grammatical person is found mostly between verb and subject. An example from English has been given in the introduction to this article.
Agreement between pronoun and antecedent also requires the selection of the correct person. For example, if the antecedent is the first person noun phrase Mary and I, then a first person pronoun is required; however, most noun phrases are third person, and are replaced by a third person pronoun.

Number

Agreement based on grammatical number can occur between verb and subject, as in the case of grammatical person discussed above. In fact the two categories are often conflated within verb conjugation patterns: there are specific verb forms for first person singular, second person plural and so on. Some examples:
  • I really am vs. We really are
  • The boy sings vs. The boys sing
Again as with person, there is agreement in number between pronouns and antecedents:
  • The girl did her job vs. The girls did their job
Agreement also occurs between nouns and their specifier and modifiers, in some situations. This is common in languages such as French and Spanish, where articles, determiners and adjectives agree in number with the nouns they qualify:
  • le grand homme vs. les grands hommes
  • el hombre alto vs. los hombres altos
In English this is not such a common feature, although there are certain determiners that occur specifically with singular or plural nouns only:
  • One big car vs. Two big cars
  • Much great work vs. ''Many great works''

    Gender

In languages in which grammatical gender plays a significant role, there is often agreement in gender between a noun and its modifiers. For example, in French:
  • le grand homme vs. la grande chaise
Such agreement is also found with predicate adjectives: l'homme est grand vs. la chaise est grande. However, in some languages, such as German, this is not the case; only attributive modifiers show agreement:
  • der große Mann vs. der Mann ist groß
In the case of verbs, gender agreement is less common, although it may still occur, for example in Arabic verbs where the second and third persons take different inflections for masculine and feminine subjects. In the French compound past tense, the past participle – formally an adjective – agrees in certain circumstances with the subject or with an object. In Russian and most other Slavic languages, the form of the past tense agrees in gender with the subject, again due to derivation from an earlier adjectival construction.
There is also agreement in gender between pronouns and their antecedents. Examples of this can be found in English :
  • The man reached his destination vs. The ship reached her/its destination
For more detail see Gender in English.

Case

In languages that have a system of cases, there is often agreement by case between a noun and its modifiers. For example, in German:
  • der gute Mann vs. des guten Manns
In fact, the modifiers of nouns in languages such as German and Latin agree with their nouns in number, gender and case; all three categories are conflated together in paradigms of declension.
Case agreement is not a significant feature of English. Agreement between such pronouns can sometimes be observed:
  • Who came first – he or his brother? vs. ''Whom did you see – him or his brother?''

    Alliterative agreement

A rare type of agreement that phonologically copies parts of the head rather than agreeing with a grammatical category. For example, in Bainouk:
In this example, what is copied is not a prefix, but rather the initial syllable of the head.

By language

Languages can have no conventional agreement whatsoever, as in Japanese or Malay; barely any, as in English; a small amount, as in spoken French; a moderate amount, as in Greek or Latin; or a large amount, as in Swahili.

English

Modern English does not have a particularly large amount of agreement, although it is present.
Apart from verbs, the main examples are the determiners this and that, which become these and those respectively when the following noun is plural:
All regular verbs in English agree in the third-person singular of the present indicative by adding a suffix of either -s or -es. The latter is generally used after stems ending in the sibilants sh, ch, ss, or zz
Present tense of to love:
In the present tense, the following verbs have irregular conjugations for the third-person singular:
  • to have: has
  • to do: does
  • to say: says
There is a distinction between irregular verb conjugations in the spoken language and irregular spellings of words in the written language. Linguistics generally concerns itself with the natural, spoken language, and not with spelling conventions in the written language. The verb to go is often given as an example of a verb with an irregular present tense conjugation, on account of adding "-es" instead of just "-s" for the third person singular conjugation. However, this is merely an arbitrary spelling convention. In the spoken language, the present tense conjugation of to go is entirely regular. If we were to classify to go as irregular based on the spelling of goes, then by the same reasoning, we would have to include other regular verbs with irregular spelling conventions such as to veto/vetoes, to echo/echoes, to carry/carries, to hurry/hurries, etc. In contrast, the verb to do is actually irregular in its spoken third-person singular conjugation, in addition to having a somewhat irregular spelling. While the verb do rhymes with shoe, its conjugation does does not rhyme with shoes; the verb does rhymes with fuzz.
Conversely, the verb to say, while it may appear to be regular based on its spelling, is in fact irregular in its third person singular present tense conjugation: Say is pronounced, but says is pronounced. Say rhymes with pay, but says does not rhyme with pays.
The highly irregular verb to be is the only verb with more agreement than this in the present tense.
Present tense of to be:
In English, defective verbs generally show no agreement for person or number, they include the modal verbs: can, may, shall, will, must, should, ought.
In Early Modern English agreement existed for the second person singular of all verbs in the present tense, as well as in the past tense of some common verbs. This was usually in the form -est, but -st and -t also occurred. This does not affect the endings for other persons and numbers.
Example present tense forms: thou wilt, thou shalt, thou art, thou hast, thou canst.
Example past tense forms: thou wouldst, thou shouldst, thou wast, thou hadst, thou couldst
Note also the agreement shown by to be even in the subjunctive mood.
However, for nearly all regular verbs, a separate thou form was no longer commonly used in the past tense. Thus the auxiliary verb to do is used, e.g. thou didst help, not *thou helpedst.
Here are some special cases for subject–verb agreement in English:

Always singular

Indefinite pronouns like one, all, everyone, everything, everybody, nothing, nobody, anyone, anything, anybody, another, etc. are treated as singular.
  • "All's well that ends well."
  • "One sows, another reaps."
  • "Together Everyone Achieves More–that's why we're a TEAM."
  • "If wealth is lost, nothing is lost. If health is lost, something is lost. If the character is lost, everything is lost."
  • "Nothing succeeds like success."
Exceptions: None is construed in the singular or plural as the sense may require, though the plural is commonly used. When none is clearly intended to mean not one, it should be followed by a singular verb. The SAT testing service, however, considers none to be strictly singular.
  • "None so deaf as those who don't hear."
  • "None prosper by begging."
The pronouns neither and either are singular although they seem to be referring to two things.
Words after each, every, and many a are treated as singular.
  • "Every dog is a lion at home."
  • "Many a penny makes a pound."
  • "Each man and each woman has a vote."
Exceptions: When the subject is followed by each, the verb agrees to the original subject.
  • "Double coincidence of wants occurs when two parties each desire to sell what the other exactly wants to buy."
A measurement or quantity is treated as singular.
  • "A thousand dollars is a high price to pay."
Exception: "Ten dollars were scattered on the floor".
Exception: A fraction or percentage can be singular or plural based on the noun that follows it.
  • "Half a loaf is better than no bread."
  • "One in three people globally do not have access to safe drinking water."
A question with who or what takes a singular verb.
A mathematical expression is treated as singular.
  • "Two and two is four."