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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.
When a noun is used as the subject or object, then the concord must match its class. To refer to someone in the third-person, without a noun, classes 1 and 2 are used. The subject concord must always be present, except in the infinitive and imperative forms. The object concord is always optional, even when an explicit object follows the verb.
When a noun is used as the subject or object, then the concord must match its class. Animate nouns (referring to a person or animal) are an exception and these occur with concords of the noun classes 1 (singular) or 2 (plural). The subject concord must always be present, except in the infinitive, habitual and imperative forms.
Verbs and qualificatives used to describe a noun are brought into agreement with that noun by using the appropriate concords. There are seven basic types of concords in Sesotho. In addition, there are two immutable prefixes used with verbs that function similarly to concords. [bɑt͡ɬʼa'ɪʀɑlɑ] Ba tla e rala ('they shall design it')
The class 9 concord is e-and class 1(a) has an irregular concord ya-(which appears as a-in non-standard speech) suggesting an inherent close-mid front /ɪ/ vowel. This is one instance of the high toneme appearing as the extra-high allotone without immediately following another high tone (see Sesotho tonology ).
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.
This is exactly the same way that the negatives of most verbs in most tenses and moods are formed. Additionally, just as with verb negatives, the subjectival concord for class 1 nouns becomes a-, and all subjectival concords are high toned (not just third persons and noun classes). Note that the subjectival concord does not affect the tones of ...
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 ...