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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.
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 .
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 tendency for plural nouns to elicit attraction more often is caused by a marking plurality as a feature, where singularity is considered part of the default, and that activation of the noun plurality marker is what attracts the plural verb form activation. [3] Agreement attraction not only appears with subject-verb agreement, but also with ...
An intransitive verb is associated with only one argument, a subject. The different kinds of arguments are usually represented as S , A , and O . S is the sole argument of an intransitive verb, A is the subject (or most agent-like ) argument of a transitive verb, and O is the direct object (or most patient-like ) argument of a transitive verb.
In linguistic typology, subject–verb–object (SVO) is a sentence structure where the subject comes first, the verb second, and the object third. Languages may be classified according to the dominant sequence of these elements in unmarked sentences (i.e., sentences in which an unusual word order is not used for emphasis).
In such languages, the subject of a verb is marked for nominative case, but the object is unmarked, as are citation forms and objects of prepositions. Such alignments are clearly documented only in northeastern Africa , particularly in the Cushitic languages , and the southwestern United States and adjacent parts of Mexico, in the Yuman languages .
Inverse copular constructions where the inverted predicative expression is a noun phrase are noteworthy in part because subject-verb agreement can (at least in English) be established with the pre-verb predicative NP as opposed to with the post-verb subject NP, e.g. a. The pictures are a problem. - Canonical word order, standard subject-verb ...