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In linguistics, agreement or concord (abbreviated agr) occurs when a word changes form depending on the other words to which it relates. (2025). 9781428231450, Cengage Learning. ISBN 9781428231450 It is an instance of inflection, and usually involves making the value of some grammatical category (such as gender or person) "agree" between varied words or parts of the sentence.
For example, in Standard English, one may say I am or he is, but not "I is" or "he am". This is because English grammar requires that the verb and its subject agree in person. The I and he are first and third person respectively, as are the am and is. The verb form must be selected so that it has the same person as the subject in contrast to Synesis, which is based on meaning. (2025). 9783110197716, De Gruyter. ISBN 9783110197716
Agreement between pronoun (or corresponding possessive adjective) and antecedent also requires the selection of the correct person. For example, if the antecedent is the first person noun phrase Mary and I, then a first person pronoun ( we/us/our) is required; however, most noun phrases ( the dog, my cats, Jack and Jill, etc.) are third person, and are replaced by a third person pronoun ( he/she/it/they etc.).
Again as with person, there is agreement in number between pronouns (or their corresponding possessives) and antecedents:
Agreement also occurs between nouns and their specifier and modifiers, in some situations. This is common in languages such as French and Spanish, where articles, determiners and (both attributive and predicative) agree in number with the nouns they qualify:
In English this is not such a common feature, although there are certain determiners that occur specifically with singular or plural nouns only:
In the case of verbs, gender agreement is less common, although it may still occur, for example in Arabic verbs where the second and third persons take different inflections for masculine and feminine subjects. In the French verbs compound past tense, the past participle – formally an adjective – agrees in certain circumstances with the subject or with an object (see passé composé for details). In Russian grammar and most other Slavic languages, the form of the past tense agrees in gender with the subject, again due to derivation from an earlier adjectival construction.
There is also agreement in gender between pronouns and their antecedents. Examples of this can be found in English (although English pronouns principally follow natural gender rather than grammatical gender):
Case agreement is not a significant feature of English (only personal pronouns and the pronoun who have any case marking). Agreement between such pronouns can sometimes be observed:
In this example, what is copied is not a prefix, but rather the initial syllable of the head "river".
Apart from verbs, the main examples are the determiners “this” and “that”, which become “these” and “those” respectively when the following noun is plural:
All English verbs (and nearly all irregular ones) in English agree in the third-person singular of the present indicative by adding a Affix of either -s or -es. The latter is generally used after stems ending in the sh, ch, ss, or zz (e.g. he rushes, it lurches, she amasses, it buzzes.)
Present tense of to love:
In the present tense (indicative mood), the following verbs have irregular conjugations for the third-person singular:
Conversely, the verb to say, while it may appear to be regular based on its spelling, is in fact irregular in its third person singular present tense conjugation: Say is pronounced /seɪ/, but says is pronounced /sɛz/. Say rhymes with pay, but says does not rhyme with pays.
The highly irregular verb to be is the only verb with more agreement than this in the present tense.
Present tense of to be:
In English, generally show no agreement for person or number, they include the : can, may, shall, will, must, should, ought.
In Early Modern English agreement existed for the second person singular of all verbs in the present tense, as well as in the past tense of some common verbs. This was usually in the form -est, but -st and -t also occurred. Note that this does not affect the endings for other persons and numbers.
Example present tense forms: thou wilt, thou shalt, thou art, thou hast, thou canst. Example past tense forms: thou wouldst, thou shouldst, thou wast, thou hadst, thou couldst
Note also the agreement shown by to be even in the subjunctive mood.
| +Imperfect subjunctive of to be in Early modern English |
However, for nearly all regular verbs, a separate thou form was no longer commonly used in the past tense. Thus the auxiliary verb to do is used, e.g. thou didst help, not *thou helpedst.
Here are some special cases for subject–verb agreement in English:
Always Singular
- All's well that ends well.
- One sows, another reaps.
- Together Everyone Achieves More–that's why we're a TEAM.
- If wealth is lost, nothing is lost. If health is lost, something is lost. If the character is lost, everything is lost.
- Nothing succeeds like success.
Exceptions: None is construed in the singular or plural as the sense may require, though the plural is commonly used. When none is clearly intended to mean not one, it should be followed by a singular verb. The SAT testing service, however, considers none to be strictly singular.
- None so deaf as those who don't hear.
- None prosper by begging.
- Every dog is a lion at home.
- Many a penny makes a pound.
- Each man and each woman has a vote.
Exceptions: When the subject is followed by each, the verb agrees to the original subject.
- Double coincidence of wants occurs when two parties each desire to sell what the other exactly wants to buy.
- Thousand dollars is a high price to pay.
Exceptions: Ten dollars were scattered on the floor. (= Ten dollar bills)
Exceptions: Fraction or percentage can be singular or plural based on the noun that follows it.
- Half a loaf is better than no bread.
- One in three people globally do not have access to safe drinking water.
- Who is to bell the cat?
- A food web is a graphical representation of what-eats-what in an ecosystem.
- Two and two is four.
Always Plural
- The MD and the CEO of the company have arrived.
- Time and tide wait for none.
- Weal and woe come by turns.
- Day and night are alike to a blind man.
Exceptions: If the nouns, however, suggest one idea or refer to the same thing or person, the verb is singular.
- The good and generous thinks the whole world is friendly.
- The new bed and breakfast opens this week.
- The MD and CEO has arrived.
Exceptions: Words joined to a subject by with, in addition to, along with, as well (as), together with, besides, not, etc. are parenthetical and the verb agrees with the original subject.
- One cow breaks the fence, and a dozen leap it.
- A dozen of eggs cost around $1.5.
- 1 mole of oxygen react with 2 moles of hydrogen gas to form water.
- The rich plan for tomorrow, the poor for today.
- Where the cattle stand together, the lion lies down hungry.
Singular or Plural
- Success or failure depends on individuals.
- Neither I nor you are to blame.
- Either you or he has to go.
(But at times, it is considered better to reword such grammatically correct but awkward sentences.)
- The jury has arrived at a unanimous decision.
- The committee are divided in their opinion.
- His family is quite large.
- His family have given him full support in his times of grief.
- There's a huge audience in the gallery today.
- The audience are requested to take their seats.
Exceptions: British English, however, tends to treat team and company names as plural.
- India beat Sri Lanka by six wickets in a pulsating final to deliver World Cup glory to their cricket-mad population for the first time since 1983. (BBC)
- India wins cricket World Cup for 1st time in 28 years. (Washington Post)
- There's more than one way to skin a cat.
Verbs must agree in person and number, and sometimes in gender, with their subjects. Determiners and adjectives must agree in case, number and gender with the nouns they modify.
Sample Latin verb: the present indicative active of portare ( portar), to carry:
In Latin, a pronoun such as "ego" and "tu" is only inserted for contrast and selection. Proper nouns and common nouns functioning as subject are nonetheless frequent. For this reason, Latin is described as a null-subject language.
An example of this is the verb travailler, which goes as follows (the single words in italic type are pronounced /tʁa.vaj/):
On the other hand, a verb like partir has (the single words in italic type are pronounced /paʁ/):
The final S or T is silent, and the other three forms sound different from one another and from the singular forms.
Adjectives agree in gender and number with the nouns that they modify in French. As with verbs, the agreements are sometimes only shown in spelling since forms that are written with different agreement suffixes are sometimes pronounced the same (e.g. joli, jolie); although in many cases the final consonant is pronounced in feminine forms, but silent in masculine forms (e.g. petit vs. petite). Most plural forms end in -s, but this consonant is only pronounced in liaison contexts, and it is determinants that help understand if the singular or plural is meant. The of verbs agree in gender and number with the subject or object in some instances.
Articles, possessives and other determinants also decline for number and (only in the singular) for gender, with plural determinants being the same for both genders. This normally produces three forms: one for masculine singular nouns, one for feminine singular nouns, and another for plural nouns of either gender:
Notice that some of the above also change (in the singular) if the following word begins with a vowel: le and la become l′, du and de la become de l′, ma becomes mon (as if the noun were masculine) and ce becomes cet.
The predicate agrees in number with the subject and if it is copulative (i.e., it consists of a noun/adjective and a linking verb), both parts agree in number with the subject. For example: A könyv ek érdekes ek volt ak "The books were interesting" ("a": the, "könyv": book, "érdekes": interesting, "voltak": were): the plural is marked on the subject as well as both the adjectival and the copulative part of the predicate.
Within noun phrases, adjectives do not show agreement with the noun, though pronouns do. e.g. a szép könyv eitekkel "with your nice books" ("szép": nice): the suffixes of the plural, the possessive "your" and the case marking "with" are only marked on the noun.
In some cases in Swedish language, Norwegian and Danish language, adjectives and participles as predicates appear to disagree with their subjects. This phenomenon is referred to as .
| +Agreement of the adjective «liten»(small) in Norwegian !Masculine !Feminine !Neuter !Plural !Definite (strong inflection) | ||||
| Liten | Lita | Lite | Små | Lille |
In Norwegian bokmål and Danish language it is only required to decline past participles in number and definiteness when in an attributive position.
Verbs have 6 different forms in the present tense, for three persons in singular and plural. As in Latin, subject is frequently dropped.
Another characteristic is agreement in participles, which have different forms for different genders:
There is also agreement in number. For example: Vi tabu vi wili vi tatosha (Two books will be enough), Michungwa miwili itatosha (Two orange-trees will be enough), Machungwa mawili yatatosha (Two oranges will be enough).
Class and number are indicated with prefixes (or sometimes their absence), which are not always the same for nouns, adjectives and verbs, as illustrated by the examples.
In addition, some verbs also agree with the classifier the subject takes. In the American Sign Language verb for "to be under", the classifier a verb takes goes under a downward-facing B handshape (palm facing downward). For example, if a person or an animal was crawled under something, a V handshape with bent fingers would go under the palm, but if it was a pencil, an 1-handshape (pointer finger out) would go under the palm.
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