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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 (portar), to carry: porto - I carry portas - you [singular] carry
In British English (BrE), collective nouns can take either singular (formal agreement) or plural (notional agreement) verb forms, according to whether the emphasis is on the body as a whole or on the individual members respectively; compare a committee was appointed with the committee were unable to agree.
The concepts of head-marking and dependent-marking are commonly applied to languages that have richer inflectional morphology than English. There are, however, a few types of agreement in English that can be used to illustrate those notions. The following graphic representations of a clause, a noun phrase, and a prepositional phrase involve ...
This can refer to agreement attraction, wherein a feature is assigned based on agreement with another word. This tends to happen in English with subject-verb agreement, especially where the subject is separated from the verb in a complex noun phrase structure. It can also refer to case attraction, which assigns features based on grammatical ...
English has few inflectional markers of agreement and so can be construed as zero-marking much of the time. Dependent-marking, however, occurs when a singular or plural noun demands the singular or plural form of the demonstrative determiner this/these or that/those and when a verb or preposition demands the subject or object form of a personal pronoun: I/me, he/him, she/her, they/them, who/whom.
In Chomsky's 1970 [±V, ±N] analysis, words with the feature "plus noun" that are not verbs "minus verb", are predicted to be nouns, while words with the feature "plus verb" and "minus noun" would be verbs. Following from this, when a word has both characteristics of nouns and verbs we get adjectives. When a word lacks either feature, one ...
English adjectives, as with other word classes, cannot in general be identified as such by their form, [24] although many of them are formed from nouns or other words by the addition of a suffix, such as -al (habitual), -ful (blissful), -ic (atomic), -ish (impish, youngish), -ous (hazardous), etc.; or from other adjectives using a prefix ...
Different forms of English handle verb agreement with collective count nouns differently. For example, users of British English generally accept that collective nouns take either singular or plural verb forms depending on context and the metonymic shift that it implies, while in some other forms of English the verb agreement is less flexible.