Thinking about agreement.
Part of Dick Hudson's web tutorial on
Word Grammar
What is it?
• When one word's inflection depends on that
of another word.
– e.g. this book ~ these books
• but NOT: *this books or *these book
• For native speakers, it's automatic.
• Foreigners often forget or don't know.
• Agreement is also called 'concord'.
Where is it?
• In only two places in English grammar:
– determiners agree with their complement:
• this book ~ these books
– tensed verbs agree with their subject:
• he runs ~ they run
• 'subject-verb agreement' or SVA
• So it's not a major concern in the grammar.
• But it raises major general issues.
Dialects and change
• Agreement is gradually reducing in English.
– Old English: adjectives also agreed with nouns
– Some modern dialects: very little agreement
even between subject and verb.
• Most non-standard dialects have less
agreement than standard English.
– So standard English is conservative
– and non-agreeing dialects are stigmatized.
Subject-verb agreement in standard
English
• All present-tense verbs
– e.g. He sleeps ~ They sleep
– except: modal verbs
• He can ~ They can …
• The past tense of BE
– He was ~ They were
What use is subject-verb agreement?
• In Old English, it sometimes helped to
distinguish subjects from objects
– because these could be in any order.
• But in Modern English, subjects and objects
are easily distinguished by order.
– e.g. John (subject) loves Mary (object).
• So SVA is redundant, and useless.
Non-standard dialects
• All tend to have less SVA than standard.
• Most have lost was ~ were
– Some have he was ~ they was
– others have he were ~ they were
– others have he were ~ he was
• Some have lost SVA in the present tense
– either: He run ~ They run
– or: He runs ~ They runs
Semantic SVA
• Unlike many languages, English allows
SVA to be driven by meaning, not syntax.
• A singular noun that refers to many people
may count as plural.
– e.g. Her family are all elderly.
– The government have announced ….
How does agreement affect texts?
• Only indirectly, as one of the criteria for
recognising complements and subjects.
• So you don't need to indicate agreement in
your analysis.
• But if you have a non-standard text, you can
expect non-standard agreements.
Mistakes
• Non-standard forms are NOT mistakes
– E.g. We was may be excellent non-standard!
• But we do make mistakes in speaking and
writing.
– because our syntax gets muddled in our minds.
• SVA attracts a lot of mistakes.
For example …
(1) No-one except his own supporters agree
with him.
(2) No-one agrees with him.
• Why did the speaker of (1) use agree, not
agrees as in (2)?
• Because supporters had replaced no-one as
the most active noun in the speaker's
memory.
Summary
• Agreement is marginal in English grammar
– and becoming increasingly marginal.
• It's not part of the syntactic structure.
– It's a clue to syntactic structure
– but it's almost always redundant.
• It's an interesting area where dialects differ,
• And where real mistakes happen.