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Agreement based on grammatical number can occur between verb and subject, as in the case of grammatical person discussed above. In fact the two categories are often conflated within verb conjugation patterns: there are specific verb forms for first person singular, second person plural and so on.
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.
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 languages where the verb is inflected, it often agrees with its primary argument (the subject) in person, number or gender. With the exception of the verb to be, English shows distinctive agreements only in the third person singular, present tense form of verbs, which are marked by adding "-s" ( walks) or "-es" (fishes).
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 ]
Languages may be head-marking in verb phrases and dependent-marking in noun phrases, such as most Bantu languages, or vice versa, and it has been argued that the subject rather than the verb is the head of a clause so "head-marking" is not necessarily a coherent typology. Still, languages that are head-marking in both noun and verb phrases are ...
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".
In such languages, the subject of a verb is marked for nominative case, but the object is unmarked, as are citation forms and objects of prepositions. Such alignments are clearly documented only in northeastern Africa , particularly in the Cushitic languages , and the southwestern United States and adjacent parts of Mexico, in the Yuman languages .