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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 .
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).
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.
These are all possible word orders for the subject, object, and verb in the order of most common to rarest (the examples use "she" as the subject, "loves" as the verb, and "him" as the object): SOV is the order used by the largest number of distinct languages; languages using it include Japanese , Korean , Mongolian , Turkish , the Indo-Aryan ...
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".
Contrary to the subject-auxiliary inversion, the verb in cases of subject–verb inversion in English is not required to be an auxiliary verb; it is, rather, a full verb or a form of the copula be. If the sentence has an auxiliary verb, the subject is placed after the auxiliary and the main verb. For example: a. A unicorn will come into the ...
In languages with V2 word order, such as most Germanic languages except for Modern English, as well as Ingush and Oʼodham, the verb is always the second element in a main clause. The subject precedes the verb by default, but if another word or phrase is put at the front of the clause, the subject is moved to the position immediately after the ...