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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:
In American English (AmE), collective nouns are almost always singular in construction: the committee was unable to agree. However, when a speaker wishes to emphasize that the individuals are acting separately, a plural pronoun may be employed with a singular or plural verb: the team takes their seats, rather than the team takes its seats.
A verb together with its dependents, excluding its subject, may be identified as a verb phrase (although this concept is not acknowledged in all theories of grammar [23]). A verb phrase headed by a finite verb may also be called a predicate. The dependents may be objects, complements, and modifiers (adverbs or adverbial phrases).
The head of the subject noun phrase, "efforts", is plural, but the verb appears in a singular form because the local noun "language" in the interceding phrase is singular, and therefore attracts the production of the singular feature in "is". While Bock pointed to this example, it doesn't follow the more common pattern where the local nouns are ...
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.
Verbs follow nouns in plural agreement only when the verb comes after the subject. When a verb comes before an explicit subject, the verb is always singular. Also, only animate plural and dual nouns take plural agreement; inanimate plural nouns are always analyzed as singular feminine or plural feminine for the purpose of agreement.
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The object, in contrast, appears lower in the second tree, where it is a dependent of the non-finite verb. The subject remains a dependent finite verb when subject-auxiliary inversion occurs: Subjects 3. The prominence of the subject is consistently reflected in its position in the tree as an immediate dependent of the root word, the finite verb.