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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 .
In linguistics, grammatical number is a feature of nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one", "two" or "three or more"). [1] English and many other languages present number categories of singular or plural. Some languages also have a dual, trial and paucal number or other arrangements.
When compound subjects are thought of as a single unit, a singular verb is used, e.g. Peanut butter and jelly is available in the cafeteria. [ 1 ] As shown in the examples, if the subjects are joined by or , the rules are often ill-defined, especially when two elements that differ in grammatical gender or grammatical number are coordinated.
Verbal agreement, or concord, is a morpho-syntactic construct in which properties of the subject and/or objects of a verb are indicated by the verb form. Verbs are then said to agree with their subjects (resp. objects).
This sentence is ungrammatical because the subject "gardener" is singular, but "are" is plural, which was attracted by the plural noun object phrase "which flowers" that appear just before the verb due to WH-movement. Object attraction also appears in SOV constructions in Dutch, where agreement attraction occurs between the verb and the local ...
In Hopi, dual nouns as subjects take the suffix -vit and singular verbs. Hopi does not have dual pronouns, but the plural pronouns may be used with singular verbs with a dual meaning. However, it is not clear if this is pluractionality or simply number agreement on the verb. See Hopi language for details.
For example, with collective nouns such as committee, which denote a unit composed of multiple individuals, agreement can either be singular because the noun is morphologically singular (e.g., The committee has not yet come to a decision) or plural because it is semantically plural (e.g.,The committee have not yet come to a decision). [26]
Welsh has two systems of grammatical number, singular–plural and collective–singulative. Since the loss of the noun inflection system of earlier Celtic, plurals have become unpredictable and can be formed in several ways: by adding a suffix to the end of the word (most commonly -au), as in tad "father" and tadau "fathers", through vowel affection, as in bachgen "boy" and bechgyn "boys", or ...