Advanced Grammar Topics: Agreement

Written by Blackkdark on 1st July 2007

A concept which occurs in most languages, if not all of them is agreement. The idea is that elements in a sentence interact with each other, in order to show ideas, and make sense in normal conversation. English too has this concept called Agreement, although it is not as heavy as some other languages. English agreement lies heavily in the verbs. In many languages, there is Modifer agreement, verb agreement, gender agreement, case agreement, and semantic agreement. There is some overlap with those, and I'm sure there are other forms of agreement as well.

Verb agreement may be the most common. This is where the verb changes due to the person and/or number of the pronoun or noun. English adds -s to verbs in the third person singular. It also changes the verb to be into am in the first person sing, is in the third person sing, and are in all the rest, and that's only in the present tense. In some languages, such as Latin, Spanish, Russian or German, there are different cases for all the different persons and numbers. In essence, the verb must agree, either with an ending or some other way, with the noun or pronoun being used. Although it is called agreement too, for future reference, it is for all practical means the dreaded word, Conjugation.

Gender Agreement doesn't exist in English because, we don't have any genders. One can refer to the Gender article for more info on it: http://www.huitalk.com/articles/advanced-grammar-topics-genders. Often adjectives, possessive pronouns, articles, predicate adjectives, nouns, and sometimes even verbs are affected by gender. Adjectives, articles, possessive pronouns and predicate adjectives in some languages have to agree in gender directly with the noun (or pronoun) they describe. Nouns describing persons and animate living things usually have agree with the gender of the person or thing. Some languages have verb conjugations which agree with the speaker, Hebrew is one of them.

Case agreement means that the same adjectival objects, namely adjectives, predicate adjectives, articles, and possessive pronouns have to agree with whatever case the noun is. This affects languages that have declensions mostly. If a noun is dative, then the article and any other modifiers (adjectival objects) usually has to agree and match up with a dative form.

Modifier Agreement is mentioned above and is a mixture of case and gender agreement. It is just the name for the object that agrees. A Modifier can be an adjective, possessive pronoun, article, amongst other things.

Semantic agreement has several different means and cases. One is mentioned above with Gender agreement: if a noun describes a person or living thing, it is often the gender of whatever gender that thing is. This happens a bit in English with professions, nationality nouns, and other such things. A Waiter is male and a Waitress is female, an actor is male whereas actress is female. The -ess ending usually goes to indicate a female. Though in modern days, the "male" form is turning out to be more and more unisex, as well as feminist replacements of words like chairman, mailman, and policeman* into chairperson, mail carrier, and police officer, just to show a few examples. Usually the masculine plural covers both genders, although female plurals do exist and are used. More pairs of male/female nouns include: Englishman/Englishwoman, Jew/Jewess (archaic), Lion/Lioness (it's a word), King/Queen, Steward/Stewardess, God/Goddess Count/Countess, Baron/Baroness, Prince/Princess. Although not all of the forms above are still used, they once showed a difference in Gender in English nouns. A Semantic agreement must exist between the object and the word.
Another case of semantic agreement involves prepositional phrases in some languages that are declined. The one, which has this issue, with which I have the most experience is German, although I know it also exists in Latin. In German, the case of a noun which follows a select number of prepositions may change, based on the meaning of the whole phrase. If it involves motion (more or less) it can take accusative, and if it doesn't, then it takes dative.
Along the same lines, in German, French, Italian, and some dialects of Norwegian, as well as probably other languages, the auxilary verb (to have in English) to make the past perfect tense, could be either to have or to be, depending on the meaning of the verb. If the verb is a verb of motion, then it usually gets the verb to be, whereas in mostly all the other cases it gets to have. This is semantic agreement.

*Words like Chairman, Spokeman, Policeman, and others with the -man ending usually share the root meaning not male, but rather one. In German, as well as Old English, the word Man means "One," and in German Mann means man. So a spokesman would not mean, "a man who speaks," but rather, "One who speaks," Policeman, "One who polices," etc. I believe women should have equal rights, but know your facts before attacking the language, Feminists.