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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.
Here the subject may invert with certain main verbs, e.g. After the pleasure comes the pain, or with a chain of verbs, e.g. In the box will be a bottle. These are described in the article on the subject–verb inversion in English. Further, inversion was not limited to auxiliaries in older forms of English. Examples of non-auxiliary verbs being ...
This simple sentence has one independent clause which contains one subject, I, and one verb, run. The girl ran into her bedroom. This simple sentence has one independent clause which contains one subject, girl, and one predicate, ran into her bedroom. The predicate is a verb phrase that consists of more than one word.
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.
Of these three criteria, the first one (agreement) is the most reliable. The subject agrees with the finite verb in person and number (and sometimes in gender as well). The second and third criterion are merely strong tendencies that can be flouted in certain constructions, e.g. Tom is studying chemistry.
The word there is used as a pronoun in some sentences, playing the role of a dummy subject, normally of an intransitive verb. The "logical subject" of the verb then appears as a complement after the verb. This use of there occurs most commonly with forms of the verb be in existential clauses, to refer to the presence or existence of something.
The following notations will be used to discuss the various types of alignment: [1] [2] S (from sole), the subject of an intransitive verb; A (from agent), the subject of a transitive verb; O (from object), the object of a transitive verb. Some authors use the label P (from patient) for O.
The subject is defined as the verb argument that appears outside the canonical finite verb phrase, whereas the object is taken to be the verb argument that appears inside the verb phrase. [3] This approach takes the configuration as primitive, whereby the grammatical relations are then derived from the configuration.