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

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


References

other languages