Agreement

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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

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'

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

References

other languages