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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.