Agreement

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 l-a casa nuev-a 'the new house', el libro nuev-o 'the new book', l-as casas nuev-as 'the new houses', l-os libros nuev-os 'the new books'

• Agreement of verb with subject noun phrase:

German ich kauf-e 'I buy', du kauf-st 'you(SG) buy', er kauf-t 'he buys', wir kauf-en 'we buy', ihr kauf-t 'you(PL) buy', 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

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