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.

(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.

For example …

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.