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

(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'

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

References

other languages