Agreement (linguistics)

In languages, agreement is a form of cross-reference between different parts of a sentence or phrase. Agreement happens when one word changes in form depending on which other words it is being related to.

For example, one does not say I is in English, because is cannot be used when the subject is I. The word is is said not to agree with the word I. This is why the grammatical form is I am, even though the verb still has the same function and basic meaning.

Functions

Agreement often adds redundancy to languages. In addition, in some languages, agreement allows word order to be varied without resorting to case endings. In Swahili, with its many noun classes, if a verb's arguments have different classes, a word order other than the default SVO can be used because agreement makes it clear which words belong to the subject and which belong to the object(s). Common types of characteristics which may trigger grammatical agreement are:

• Grammatical person: e.g. I am versus He is.
• Grammatical number: e.g. One car versus Two cars, or I am versus We are.
• Grammatical gender: e.g. Jenny loves her cat versus Jimmy loves his cat.
• Grammatical case e.g. I told him versus He told me.

See also Grammatical conjugation, for other agreement categories.

Examples

Languages can have no agreement whatsoever, as in Japanese; barely any, as in English; a small amount, as in spoken French; a moderate amount, as in Greek or Latin; or a large amount, as in Hungarian.

English

Modern English does not have a particularly large amount of agreement, although it is present.

All regular verbs in English agree in the third-person singular of the present indicative by adding a suffix of either -s or -es. The latter is generally used after stems ending in the sibilants sh, ch, ss or zz (e.g. he rushes, it lurches, she amasses, it buzzes.)

Present tense of to love:

Person	Number
	Singular	Plural
First	I love	we love
Second	you love	you love
Third	he/she/it loves	they love

There are not many irregularities in this formation:

to have, to go and to do render has, goes and does.

The highly irregular verb to be is the only verb with more agreement than this in the present tense.

Present tense of to be:

Person	Number
	Singular	Plural
First	I am	we are
Second	you are	you are
Third	he/she/it is	they are

Future tense of "to be":

Person	Number
	Singular	Plural
First	I shall be	we shall be
Second	you will be	you will be
Third	he/she/it will be	they will be

Emphatic future tense of "to be":

Person	Number
	Singular	Plural
First	I will be	we will be
Second	you shall be	you shall be
Third	he/she/it shall be	they shall be

Note: the use of shall and the use of the emphatic tense are archaic in Standard English.

In English, defective verbs generally show no agreement for person or number, they include: can, may, shall, will, must, should, ought.

In Early Modern English agreement existed for the second person singular of all verbs in the present tense, as well as in the past tense of some common verbs. This was usually in the form -est, but -st and -t also occurred. Note that this does not affect the endings for other persons and numbers.

Example present tense forms: thou wilt, thou shalt, thou art, thou hast, thou canst. Example past tense forms: thou wouldst, thou shouldst, thou wast, thou hadst, thou couldst

Note also the agreement shown by to be even in the subjunctive.

Imperfect subjunctive of to be in Early modern English:

Person	Number
	Singular	Plural
First	(if) I were	(if) we were
Second	(if) thou wert	(if) you were
Third	(if) he/she/it were	(if) they were

However, for nearly all regular verbs, a separate thou form was no longer commonly used in the past tense. Thus the auxiliary verb to do would be used, e.g. thou didst help, not thou helpedst.

Latin

Compared with English, Latin is an example of a highly inflected language. The consequences for agreement are thus:

Verbs must agree in person and number, and sometimes in gender, with their subjects. Articles and adjectives must agree in case, number and gender with the nouns they modify.

Sample Latin verb: the present indicative active of "porto"

porto - I carry

portas - you [singular] carry

portat - he carries

portamus - we carry

portatis - you [plural] carry

portant - they carry

Note also that the inflectional endings mean it is not necessary to include the subject pronoun, except for emphasis, or to avoid ambiguity in complex sentences. For this reason, Latin is described as a null-subject language.

French

Spoken French always distinguishes the first person plural and the second person plural from each other and from the rest of the present tense. The other endings that appear in written French are often pronounced the same, except in liaison contexts. Irregular verbs such as être, faire, aller, and avoir possess more distinctly-pronounced agreement forms than regular verbs.

Adjectives agree in gender and number with the nouns they modify in French. As with verbs, forms that are written with different agreement suffixes are sometimes pronounced the same (e.g. joli, jolie), although in many cases the final consonant is pronounced in feminine forms, but silent in masculine forms (e.g. petit vs. petite). Plural forms end in -s, but this consonant is only pronounced in liaison contexts. The participles of verbs agree in gender and number with the subject or object in some instances. Articles also decline for number and gender.

Hungarian

In Hungarian, verbs have polypersonal agreement, which means they agree with more than one of the verb's arguments: not only its subject but also its (accusative) object. Difference is made between the case when there is a definite object and the case when the object is indefinite or there is no object at all. (The adverbs don't affect the form of the verb.) Examples: Szeretek (I love somebody or something unspecified), szeretem (I love him or her or it or them, specifically), szeretlek (I love you); szeret (he or she loves me or us or you or someone or something unspecified), szereti (he or she loves her or him or it or them, specifically). Of course, the exact object may be specified by nouns or pronouns. In short, there is agreement between a verb and the person and number of its subject and the specificness of its object (which often refers to the person more or less exactly).

See Definite and indefinite conjugations

The predicate agrees in number with the subject and if it is copulative (i.e., it consists of a noun/adjective and a linking verb), both parts agree in number with the subject. For example: A könyvek érdekesek voltak "The books were interesting" ("a": the, "könyv": book, "érdekes": interesting, "voltak": were): the plural is marked on the subject as well as both the adjectival and the copulative part of the predicate.

Within noun phrases, adjectives don't show agreement with the noun, e.g. a szép könyveitekkel "with your nice books" ("szép": nice): the suffixes of the plural, the possessive "your" and the case-marking "with" are only marked on the noun.

Swahili

Swahili and related languages have numerous noun classes. Verbs must agree in class with their subjects and adjectives with the nouns that they qualify. For example: Kitabu kimoja kitatosha (One book will be enough), Mchungwa mmoja utatosha (One orange-tree will be enough), Chungwa moja litatosha (One orange will be enough). There is also agreement in number. For example: Vitabu viwili vitatosha (Two books will be enough), Michungwa miwili itatosha (Two orange-trees will be enough), Machungwa mawili yatatosha (Two oranges will be enough). Class and number are indicated with prefixes (or sometimes their absence) which are not always the same for nouns, adjectives and verbs, as illustrated by the examples.

See also

• Declension
• Inflection
• Synthetic language
• Redundancy (language)
• Case government
• Sequence of tenses — sometimes called agreement of tenses

External links

• Agreement Biblio Home Page
• Surrey Database of Agreement, detailed examples from 15 diverse languages

Bibliography

• Corbett, Greville (1994) "Agreement". In R.E. Asher (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Oxford: Pergamon Press. 54--60.
• Corbett, Greville (2006) Agreement. Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Givon, Talmy (1984) Syntax. A Functional Typological Introduction. Vol 1. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Chapter 10.
• Mel'čuk, Igor (2006): Aspects of the theory of morphology. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Chapter 1.
• Moravcsik, Edith A. (1978). "Agreement". In: Joseph Greenberg, (ed.), Universals of Human Language. vol. 4. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 331--374.