Agreement (linguistics)
Encyclopedia
In language
s, agreement or concord is a form of cross-reference between different parts of a sentence or phrase. Agreement happens when a word changes form depending on the other words to which it relates.
For example, one does not say I is in English, because is cannot be used when the subject is I. The word is is said not to agree with the word I. This is why the grammatical form is I am, even though the verb still has the same function and basic meaning.
The agreement based on overt grammatical number
s as above is formal agreement, in contrast to notional agreement that does so based on meaning.
to languages. In addition, in some languages, agreement allows word order to be varied without resorting to case endings. In Swahili
, with its many noun classes, if a verb's arguments have different classes, a word order other than the default subject–verb–object (SVO) can be used because agreement makes it clear which words belong to the subject and which belong to the object(s). Common types of characteristics that may trigger grammatical agreement are:
See also Grammatical conjugation
, for other agreement categories.
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
.
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 (e.g. he rushes, it lurches, she amasses, it buzzes.)
Present tense of to love:
There are not many irregularities in this formation:
The highly irregular verb to be is the only verb with more agreement than this in the present tense.
Present tense of to be:
Future tense of "to be":
Emphatic future tense of "to be":
Note: the use of shall and the use of the emphatic tense are rare in Standard English.
In English, defective verb
s generally show no agreement for person or number, they include the modal verb
s: 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. Note that 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
.
Imperfect subjunctive of to be in Early modern English:
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.
Verbs must agree in person and number, and sometimes in gender, with their subjects. Articles and adjectives must agree in case, number and gender with the nouns they modify.
Sample Latin verb: the present indicative active of portare, to carry:
Note also that the inflectional endings mean it is not necessary to include the subject pronoun, except for emphasis, or to avoid ambiguity in complex sentences. For this reason, Latin is described as a null subject language
.
An example of this is the verb "travailler", which goes as follows (the forms in bold type sound /travaj/):
On the other hand, a verb like "partir" has:
Again, the forms in bold type sound alike (the final S or T is silent), and the other three forms sound differently from one another and from the singular forms.
However in liaison contexts, the final consonant is pronounced, helping differentiate at least "part" from "pars".
Adjectives agree in gender and number with the nouns they modify in French. As with verbs, forms that are written with different agreement suffixes are sometimes pronounced the same (e.g. joli, jolie), although in many cases the final consonant is pronounced in feminine forms, but silent in masculine forms (e.g. petit vs. petite). Most plural forms end in -s, but this consonant is only pronounced in liaison contexts, and it is determinants that help understand if the singular or plural is meant. The participle
s of verbs agree in gender and number with the subject or object in some instances.
Articles, possessives and other determinants also decline for number and (only in the singular) for gender, with plural determinants being the same for both genders. This normally produces three forms: one for masculine singular nouns, one for feminine singular nouns, and another for plural nouns of either gender:
Notice that some of the above also change (in the singular) if the following word begins with a vowel: le and la become l′, du and de la become de l′, ma becomes mon (as if the noun were masculine) and ce becomes cet.
: not only its subject but also its (accusative) object. Difference is made between the case when there is a definite object and the case when the object is indefinite or there is no object at all. (The adverbs do not affect the form of the verb.) Examples: Szeretek (I love somebody or something unspecified), szeretem (I love him, her, it, or them, specifically), szeretlek (I love you); szeret (he loves me, us, you, someone, or something unspecified), szereti (he loves her, him, it, or them specifically). Of course, nouns or pronouns may specify the exact object. In short, there is agreement between a verb and the person and number of its subject and the specificity of its object (which often refers to the person more or less exactly).
The predicate
agrees in number with the subject and if it is copulative (i.e., it consists of a noun/adjective and a linking verb), both parts agree in number with the subject. For example: A könyvek érdekesek voltak "The books were interesting" ("a": the, "könyv": book, "érdekes": interesting, "voltak": were): the plural is marked on the subject as well as both the adjectival and the copulative part of the predicate.
Within noun phrases, adjectives do not show agreement with the noun, e.g. a szép könyveitekkel "with your nice books" ("szép": nice): the suffixes of the plural, the possessive "your" and the case marking "with" are only marked on the noun.
are highly inflected, except for Bulgarian
and Macedonian
. The agreement is similar to Latin, for instance between adjectives and nouns in gender, number, case and animacy
(if counted as a separate category). The following examples are from Serbian
:
Verbs have 6 different forms in the present tense, for three persons in singular and plural. As in Latin, subject is frequently dropped.
Another characteristics is agreement in participles, which have different forms for different genders:
, like all other Bantu languages
, has numerous noun class
es. Verbs must agree in class with their subjects and objects, and adjectives with the nouns that they qualify. For example: Kitabu kimoja kitatosha (One book will be enough), Mchungwa mmoja utatosha (One orange-tree will be enough), Chungwa moja litatosha (One orange will be enough).
There is also agreement in number. For example: Vitabu viwili vitatosha (Two books will be enough), Michungwa miwili itatosha (Two orange-trees will be enough), Machungwa mawili yatatosha (Two oranges will be enough).
Class and number are indicated with prefixes (or sometimes their absence), which are not always the same for nouns, adjectives and verbs, as illustrated by the examples.
Language
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
s, agreement or concord is a form of cross-reference between different parts of a sentence or phrase. Agreement happens when a word changes form depending on the other words to which it relates.
For example, one does not say I is in English, because is cannot be used when the subject is I. The word is is said not to agree with the word I. This is why the grammatical form is I am, even though the verb still has the same function and basic meaning.
The agreement based on overt grammatical number
Grammatical number
In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions ....
s as above is formal agreement, in contrast to notional agreement that does so based on meaning.
Functions
Agreement often adds redundancyRedundancy (language)
In linguistics, redundancy is the construction of a phrase that presents some idea using more information, often via multiple means, than is necessary for one to be able understand the idea....
to languages. In addition, in some languages, agreement allows word order to be varied without resorting to case endings. In Swahili
Swahili language
Swahili or Kiswahili is a Bantu language spoken by various ethnic groups that inhabit several large stretches of the Mozambique Channel coastline from northern Kenya to northern Mozambique, including the Comoro Islands. It is also spoken by ethnic minority groups in Somalia...
, with its many noun classes, if a verb's arguments have different classes, a word order other than the default subject–verb–object (SVO) can be used because agreement makes it clear which words belong to the subject and which belong to the object(s). Common types of characteristics that may trigger grammatical agreement are:
- Grammatical personGrammatical personGrammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns...
: e.g. I am versus He is. - Grammatical numberGrammatical numberIn linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions ....
: e.g. One car versus Two cars, or I am versus We are. - Grammatical genderGrammatical genderGrammatical gender is defined linguistically as a system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words, such as adjectives, verbs and others. For a system of noun classes to be a gender system, every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be...
: e.g. Jenny loves her cat versus Jimmy loves his cat. - Grammatical caseGrammatical caseIn grammar, the case of a noun or pronoun is an inflectional form that indicates its grammatical function in a phrase, clause, or sentence. For example, a pronoun may play the role of subject , of direct object , or of possessor...
e.g. I told him versus He told me.
See also Grammatical conjugation
Grammatical conjugation
In linguistics, conjugation is the creation of derived forms of a verb from its principal parts by inflection . Conjugation may be affected by person, number, gender, tense, aspect, mood, voice, or other grammatical categories...
, for other agreement categories.
Examples
Languages can have no conventional agreement whatsoever, as in JapaneseJapanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
or Malay
Malay language
Malay is a major language of the Austronesian family. It is the official language of Malaysia , Indonesia , Brunei and Singapore...
; barely any, as in English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
; a small amount, as in spoken French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
; a moderate amount, as in Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
or Latin; or a large amount, as in Swahili
Swahili language
Swahili or Kiswahili is a Bantu language spoken by various ethnic groups that inhabit several large stretches of the Mozambique Channel coastline from northern Kenya to northern Mozambique, including the Comoro Islands. It is also spoken by ethnic minority groups in Somalia...
.
English
Modern English does not have a particularly large amount of agreement, although it is present.All regular verbs in English agree in the third-person singular of the present indicative by adding a suffix
Affix
An affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word. Affixes may be derivational, like English -ness and pre-, or inflectional, like English plural -s and past tense -ed. They are bound morphemes by definition; prefixes and suffixes may be separable affixes...
of either -s or -es. The latter is generally used after stems ending in the sibilants sh, ch, ss or zz (e.g. he rushes, it lurches, she amasses, it buzzes.)
Present tense of to love:
| Person | Number | |
|---|---|---|
| Singular | Plural | |
| First | I love | we love |
| Second | you love | you love |
| Third | he/she/it loves | they love |
There are not many irregularities in this formation:
- to have, to go and to do render has, goes and does.
The highly irregular verb to be is the only verb with more agreement than this in the present tense.
Present tense of to be:
| Person | Number | |
|---|---|---|
| Singular | Plural | |
| First | I am | we are |
| Second | you are | you are |
| Third | he/she/it is | they are |
Future tense of "to be":
| Person | Number | |
|---|---|---|
| Singular | Plural | |
| First | I shall be | we shall be |
| Second | you will be | you will be |
| Third | he/she/it will be | they will be |
Emphatic future tense of "to be":
| Person | Number | |
|---|---|---|
| Singular | Plural | |
| First | I will be | we will be |
| Second | you shall be | you shall be |
| Third | he/she/it shall be | they shall be |
Note: the use of shall and the use of the emphatic tense are rare in Standard English.
In English, defective verb
Defective verb
In linguistics, a defective verb is a verb which is missing e.g. a past tense, or cannot be used in some other way that normal verbs come. Formally, it is a verb with an incomplete conjugation. Defective verbs cannot be conjugated in certain tenses, aspects, or moods.-Arabic:In Arabic, defective...
s generally show no agreement for person or number, they include the modal verb
Modal verb
A modal verb is a type of auxiliary verb that is used to indicate modality -- that is, likelihood, ability, permission, and obligation...
s: can, may, shall, will, must, should, ought.
In Early Modern English
Early Modern English
Early Modern English is the stage of the English language used from about the end of the Middle English period to 1650. Thus, the first edition of the King James Bible and the works of William Shakespeare both belong to the late phase of 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. Note that 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
Subjunctive mood
In grammar, the subjunctive mood is a verb mood typically used in subordinate clauses to express various states of irreality such as wish, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, necessity, or action that has not yet occurred....
.
Imperfect subjunctive of to be in Early modern English:
| Person | Number | |
|---|---|---|
| Singular | Plural | |
| First | (if) I were | (if) we were |
| Second | (if) thou Thou The word thou is a second person singular pronoun in English. It is now largely archaic, having been replaced in almost all contexts by you. It is used in parts of Northern England and by Scots. Thou is the nominative form; the oblique/objective form is thee , and the possessive is thy or thine... wert |
(if) you were |
| Third | (if) he/she/it were | (if) they were |
However, for nearly all regular verbs, a separate thou
Thou
The word thou is a second person singular pronoun in English. It is now largely archaic, having been replaced in almost all contexts by you. It is used in parts of Northern England and by Scots. Thou is the nominative form; the oblique/objective form is thee , and the possessive is thy or thine...
form was no longer commonly used in the past tense. Thus the auxiliary verb
Auxiliary verb
In linguistics, an auxiliary verb is a verb that gives further semantic or syntactic information about a main or full verb. In English, the extra meaning provided by an auxiliary verb alters the basic meaning of the main verb to make it have one or more of the following functions: passive voice,...
to do is used, e.g. thou didst help, not thou helpedst.
Latin
Compared with English, Latin is an example of a highly inflected language. The consequences for agreement are thus:Verbs must agree in person and number, and sometimes in gender, with their subjects. Articles and adjectives must agree in case, number and gender with the nouns they modify.
Sample Latin verb: the present indicative active of portare, to carry:
- porto - I carry
- portas - you [singular] carry
- portat - he carries
- portamus - we carry
- portatis - you [plural] carry
- portant - they carry
Note also that the inflectional endings mean it is not necessary to include the subject pronoun, except for emphasis, or to avoid ambiguity in complex sentences. For this reason, Latin is described as a null subject language
Null subject language
In linguistic typology, a null-subject language is a language whose grammar permits an independent clause to lack an explicit subject. Such a clause is then said to have a null subject. Typically, null subject languages express person, number, and/or gender agreement with the referent on the verb,...
.
French
Spoken French always distinguishes the first person plural and the second person plural from each other and from the rest of the present tense in all verbs in the first conjugation (infinitives in -er) other than "aller". In most verbs from the other conjugations, each person in the plural can be distinguished among themselves and from the singular forms. The other endings that appear in written French (i.e.: all singular endings, and also the third person plural of verbs other than those with infinitives in -er) are often pronounced the same, except in liaison contexts. Irregular verbs such as être, faire, aller, and avoir possess more distinctly pronounced agreement forms than regular verbs.An example of this is the verb "travailler", which goes as follows (the forms in bold type sound /travaj/):
- je travaille
- tu travailles
- il travaille
- nous travaillons
- vous travaillez
- ils travaillent
On the other hand, a verb like "partir" has:
- je pars
- tu pars
- il part
- nous partons
- vous partez
- ils partent
Again, the forms in bold type sound alike (the final S or T is silent), and the other three forms sound differently from one another and from the singular forms.
However in liaison contexts, the final consonant is pronounced, helping differentiate at least "part" from "pars".
Adjectives agree in gender and number with the nouns they modify in French. As with verbs, forms that are written with different agreement suffixes are sometimes pronounced the same (e.g. joli, jolie), although in many cases the final consonant is pronounced in feminine forms, but silent in masculine forms (e.g. petit vs. petite). Most plural forms end in -s, but this consonant is only pronounced in liaison contexts, and it is determinants that help understand if the singular or plural is meant. The participle
Participle
In linguistics, a participle is a word that shares some characteristics of both verbs and adjectives. It can be used in compound verb tenses or voices , or as a modifier...
s of verbs agree in gender and number with the subject or object in some instances.
Articles, possessives and other determinants also decline for number and (only in the singular) for gender, with plural determinants being the same for both genders. This normally produces three forms: one for masculine singular nouns, one for feminine singular nouns, and another for plural nouns of either gender:
- Definite article: le, la, les
- Indefinite article: un, une, des
- Partitive article: du, de la, des
- Possessives (for the first person singular): mon, ma, mes
- Demonstratives: ce, cette, ces
Notice that some of the above also change (in the singular) if the following word begins with a vowel: le and la become l′, du and de la become de l′, ma becomes mon (as if the noun were masculine) and ce becomes cet.
Hungarian
In Hungarian, verbs have polypersonal agreement, which means they agree with more than one of the verb's argumentsVerb argument
In linguistics, a verb argument is a phrase that appears in a syntactic relationship with the verb in a clause. In English, for example, the two most important arguments are the subject and the direct object....
: not only its subject but also its (accusative) object. Difference is made between the case when there is a definite object and the case when the object is indefinite or there is no object at all. (The adverbs do not affect the form of the verb.) Examples: Szeretek (I love somebody or something unspecified), szeretem (I love him, her, it, or them, specifically), szeretlek (I love you); szeret (he loves me, us, you, someone, or something unspecified), szereti (he loves her, him, it, or them specifically). Of course, nouns or pronouns may specify the exact object. In short, there is agreement between a verb and the person and number of its subject and the specificity of its object (which often refers to the person more or less exactly).
- See Definite and indefinite conjugations
The predicate
Predicate (grammar)
There are two competing notions of the predicate in theories of grammar. Traditional grammar tends to view a predicate as one of two main parts of a sentence, the other being the subject, which the predicate modifies. The other understanding of predicates is inspired from work in predicate calculus...
agrees in number with the subject and if it is copulative (i.e., it consists of a noun/adjective and a linking verb), both parts agree in number with the subject. For example: A könyvek érdekesek voltak "The books were interesting" ("a": the, "könyv": book, "érdekes": interesting, "voltak": were): the plural is marked on the subject as well as both the adjectival and the copulative part of the predicate.
Within noun phrases, adjectives do not show agreement with the noun, e.g. a szép könyveitekkel "with your nice books" ("szép": nice): the suffixes of the plural, the possessive "your" and the case marking "with" are only marked on the noun.
Slavic languages
Most Slavic languagesSlavic languages
The Slavic languages , a group of closely related languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup of Indo-European languages, have speakers in most of Eastern Europe, in much of the Balkans, in parts of Central Europe, and in the northern part of Asia.-Branches:Scholars traditionally divide Slavic...
are highly inflected, except for Bulgarian
Bulgarian language
Bulgarian is an Indo-European language, a member of the Slavic linguistic group.Bulgarian, along with the closely related Macedonian language, demonstrates several linguistic characteristics that set it apart from all other Slavic languages such as the elimination of case declension, the...
and Macedonian
Macedonian language
Macedonian is a South Slavic language spoken as a first language by approximately 2–3 million people principally in the region of Macedonia but also in the Macedonian diaspora...
. The agreement is similar to Latin, for instance between adjectives and nouns in gender, number, case and animacy
Animacy
Animacy is a grammatical and/or semantic category of nouns based on how sentient or alive the referent of the noun in a given taxonomic scheme is...
(if counted as a separate category). The following examples are from Serbian
Serbian language
Serbian is a form of Serbo-Croatian, a South Slavic language, spoken by Serbs in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia and neighbouring countries....
:
- živim u malom stanu "I live in a small apartment" (masculine inanimate, singular, locative)
- živim u maloj kući "I live in a small house" (feminine, singular, locative)
- imam mali stan "I have a small apartment" (masculine inanimate, singular, accusative)
- imam malu kuću "I have a small house" (feminine, singular, accusative)
- imam malog psa "I have a small dog" (masculine animate, singular, accusative)
Verbs have 6 different forms in the present tense, for three persons in singular and plural. As in Latin, subject is frequently dropped.
Another characteristics is agreement in participles, which have different forms for different genders:
- ja sam jela "I was eating" (female speaking)
- ja sam jeo "I was eating" (male speaking)
Swahili
SwahiliSwahili language
Swahili or Kiswahili is a Bantu language spoken by various ethnic groups that inhabit several large stretches of the Mozambique Channel coastline from northern Kenya to northern Mozambique, including the Comoro Islands. It is also spoken by ethnic minority groups in Somalia...
, like all other Bantu languages
Bantu languages
The Bantu languages constitute a traditional sub-branch of the Niger–Congo languages. There are about 250 Bantu languages by the criterion of mutual intelligibility, though the distinction between language and dialect is often unclear, and Ethnologue counts 535 languages...
, has numerous noun class
Noun class
In linguistics, the term noun class refers to a system of categorizing nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of characteristic features of its referent, such as sex, animacy, shape, but counting a given noun among nouns of such or another class is often clearly conventional...
es. Verbs must agree in class with their subjects and objects, and adjectives with the nouns that they qualify. For example: Kitabu kimoja kitatosha (One book will be enough), Mchungwa mmoja utatosha (One orange-tree will be enough), Chungwa moja litatosha (One orange will be enough).
There is also agreement in number. For example: Vitabu viwili vitatosha (Two books will be enough), Michungwa miwili itatosha (Two orange-trees will be enough), Machungwa mawili yatatosha (Two oranges will be enough).
Class and number are indicated with prefixes (or sometimes their absence), which are not always the same for nouns, adjectives and verbs, as illustrated by the examples.
See also
- Case governmentCase governmentIn linguistics, case government is government of the grammatical case of verb arguments, when a verb or preposition is said to 'govern' the grammatical case on its noun phrase complement, e.g. zu governs the dative case in German: zu mir 'to me-dative'...
- DeclensionDeclensionIn linguistics, declension is the inflection of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and articles to indicate number , case , and gender...
- InflectionInflectionIn grammar, inflection or inflexion is the modification of a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense, grammatical mood, grammatical voice, aspect, person, number, gender and case...
- Redundancy (language)Redundancy (language)In linguistics, redundancy is the construction of a phrase that presents some idea using more information, often via multiple means, than is necessary for one to be able understand the idea....
- Sequence of tensesSequence of tensesIn grammar, the sequence of tenses is a rule of a particular language governing the relationship between the grammatical tenses of verbs in related clauses or sentences to show the temporal relationship of the events to...
— sometimes called agreement of tenses - Synthetic languageSynthetic languageIn linguistic typology, a synthetic language is a language with a high morpheme-per-word ratio, as opposed to a low morpheme-per-word ratio in what is described as an isolating language...