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In linguistics, agreement or concord (abbreviated agr) occurs when a word changes form depending on the other words to which it relates. [1] It is an instance of inflection, and usually involves making the value of some grammatical category (such as gender or person) "agree" between varied words or parts of the sentence.
Agreement attraction occurs when a verb agrees with a noun other than its subject. It most commonly occurs with complex subject noun phrases , a notable example of this appeared in the New Yorker: Efforts to make English the official language is gaining strength throughout the U.S. [ 3 ]
Subject + Verb (transitive) + Indirect Object + Direct Object Example: She made me a pie. This clause pattern is a derivative of S+V+O, transforming the object of a preposition into an indirect object of the verb, as the example sentence in transformational grammar is actually "She made a pie for me".
Verbs may also be affected by agreement, polypersonal agreement, incorporation, noun class, noun classifiers, and verb classifiers. [4] Agglutinative and polysynthetic languages tend to have the most complex conjugations, although some fusional languages such as Archi can also have extremely complex conjugation.
Of these three criteria, the first one (agreement) is the most reliable. The subject agrees with the finite verb in person and number (and sometimes in gender as well). The second and third criterion are merely strong tendencies that can be flouted in certain constructions, e.g. Tom is studying chemistry.
The word there is used as a pronoun in some sentences, playing the role of a dummy subject, normally of an intransitive verb. The "logical subject" of the verb then appears as a complement after the verb. This use of there occurs most commonly with forms of the verb be in existential clauses, to refer to the presence or existence of something.
In language, a clause is a constituent or phrase that comprises a semantic predicand (expressed or not) and a semantic predicate. [1] A typical clause consists of a subject and a syntactic predicate, [2] the latter typically a verb phrase composed of a verb with or without any objects and other modifiers.
Their agreement system will be sensitive to an external person or animacy hierarchy (or a combination of both): 1 > 2 > 3 or Anim > Inan and so forth. E.g., in Meskwaki (an Algonquian language), verbs inflect for both subject and object, but agreement markers do not have inherent values for these. Rather, a third marker, the direct or inverse ...