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This is because English grammar requires that the verb and its subject agree in person. The pronouns I and he are first and third person respectively, as are the verb forms am and is. The verb form must be selected so that it has the same person as the subject in contrast to notional agreement, which is based on meaning. [2] [3]
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).
Some languages have a richer agreement system in which verbs agree also with some or all of their objects. Ubykh exhibits verbal agreement for the subject, direct object, indirect object, benefaction and ablative objects (a.w3.s.xe.n.t'u.n, you gave it to him for me).
Their agreement system will be sensitive to an external person or animacy hierarchy (or a combination of both): 1 > 2 > 3 or Anim > Inan and so forth. E.g., in Meskwaki (an Algonquian language), verbs inflect for both subject and object, but agreement markers do not have inherent values for these. Rather, a third marker, the direct or inverse ...
The following sentences illustrate subject–verb inversion. They compare canonical order with the more marked inversion order, and they demonstrate that subject–verb inversion is unlikely if the subject is a weak (non-stressed) definite pronoun: a. Jim sat under the tree. b. Under the tree sat Jim. - Subject–verb inversion c. *Under the ...
This generally applies only to subject-verb agreement; pronominal agreement is by its nature long-distance, and so the concept of "closest" makes less sense in this case. If using "general agreement" and there is a disagreement among properties (e.g. some male, some female), either:
The object, in contrast, appears lower in the second tree, where it is a dependent of the non-finite verb. The subject remains a dependent finite verb when subject-auxiliary inversion occurs: Subjects 3. The prominence of the subject is consistently reflected in its position in the tree as an immediate dependent of the root word, the finite verb.