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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.
Subject–verb agreement [ edit ] 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 .
In linguistics, syntax (/ ˈ s ɪ n t æ k s / SIN-taks) [1] [2] is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences.Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency), [3] agreement, the nature of crosslinguistic variation, and the relationship between form and meaning ().
English has nominative–accusative alignment in its case marking of personal pronouns: [1] the single argument (S) of an intransitive verb ("I" in the sentence "I walked.") behaves grammatically like the agent (A) of a transitive verb ("I" in the sentence "I saw them.") but differently from the object (O) of a transitive verb ("me" in the ...
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 ]
While sentence (14) is well-formed in the adult grammar, sentence (15) is not, as indicated by the asterisk (*). The source of the ill-formedness is that the verb hug is a transitive verb and so must have a direct object, namely something or someone who receives the action of the verb. Sentence (15) is missing the receiver of hug.
In a sentence like mutila gizonak ikusi du, you know who is seeing whom because -k is added to the one doing the seeing. So the sentence means "the man saw the boy". If you want to say "the boy saw the man", add the -k instead to the word meaning "the boy": mutilak gizona ikusi du.
Grammatical abbreviations are generally written in full or small caps to visually distinguish them from the translations of lexical words. For instance, capital or small-cap PAST (frequently abbreviated to PST) glosses a grammatical past-tense morpheme, while lower-case 'past' would be a literal translation of a word with that meaning.