Agreement

FORMAT

Agreement refers to a widespread syntactic situation in which a target element agrees with a controller element in some morphosyntactic feature.

• "The term ' 'agreement' ' commonly refers to some systematic covariance between a semantic or formal property of one element and a formal property of another." (Steele 1978:610)

Examples

• Agreement of article and adjective with noun in number and gender:

Spanish

(1)l-a casa nuev-a

'the new house',

(2)el libro nuev-o

'the new book',

(3)l-as casas nuev-as

'the new houses',

(4)l-os libros nuev-os

'the new books'

• Agreement of verb with subject noun phrase:

German

(5)ich kauf-e

'I buy',

(6)du kauf-st

'you(SG) buy',

(7)er kauf-t

'he buys',

(8)wir kauf-en

'we buy',

(9)ihr kauf-t

'you(PL) buy',

(10)sie kauf-en

'they buy'

Synonyms

• concord (but this term is often differentiated from agreement in various ways)
• congruence (this term is very rare in English, but German Kongruenz is the standard term for agreement)

Subtypes

• anaphoric agreement, grammatical agreement
• alliterative agreement
• back agreement
• rich agreement

Syntax

Recently, it has been proposed that agreement is the relation between a specific head AGR and its specifier (= specifier-head agreement). Subject-verb agreement is then reduced to agreement between AGR, which is a functional projection of the agreeing verb, and the element (the subject) in the specifier position of the AGRP. Likewise, assignment of structural Case is reduced to spec,head agreement.

Link

• Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics

References

• Corbett, Greville G. 2006. Agreement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Steele, Susan. 1978. "Word order variation: a typological study." In: Greenberg, Joseph H. & Ferguson, Charles A. & Moravcsik, Edith A. (eds.) Universals of human language, vol. 4: Syntax. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 585-623.

other languages

• German Kongruenz
• Russian согласование
• Czech shoda