Thinking about agreement. Part of Dick Hudson's web tutorial on Word Grammarweb tutorial

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.