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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 .
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]
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:
In sentence 2, in contrast, agreement and semantic role suggest that problems is the subject, whereas position occupied suggests that there is the subject. In such cases then, one can take the first criterion as the most telling; the subject should agree with the finite 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).
On the other hand, Basque, Georgian, and some other languages, have polypersonal agreement: the verb agrees with the subject, the direct object, and even the secondary object if present, a greater degree of head-marking than is found in most European 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 ...
Agreement attraction occurs when a verb agrees with a noun other than its subject. It most commonly occurs with complex subject noun phrases , a notable example of this appeared in the New Yorker: Efforts to make English the official language is gaining strength throughout the U.S. [ 3 ]