Questions tagged [agreement]
Change in the form of a word depending on the grammatical features of another word.
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Gender of mixed groups defaulting to masculine – how common?
French has that rule that whenever a masculine entity is part of a group, the whole NP will default to masculine as far as agreement goes. My native language, German, also defaults gender to masculine,...
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Which non-Indoeuropean languages have noun-adjective agreement?
For example, agglutinative/fusional languages where case or possessive suffixes/endings must be attached both to a noun and all adjectives that modify it. Or any other kind of noun-adjective agreement....
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Are there purely isolating/analytic languages with grammatical gender?
It seems that all the things which reflect grammatical gender in languages have to do with inflectional (presumably also agglutinative) morphology, such as agreement.
But is that just coincidence, it ...
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How do SOV languages develop agreement affixes on verb?
According to WALS, most languages using SOV as basic order of subject, object and verb have some kind of personal agreement markers. As far as I know, these affixes rise by grammaticalization of ...
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Government versus Agreement
Taking English as an example, as I understand things, the case of a pronominal Subject is governed by the verb—it must be nominative:
She loves elephants.
*Her loves elephants. (ungrammatical)
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Are there languages with PCC effects and a more developed person system?
The Person-Case Constraint (PCC) is a constraint on which arguments can co-occur in a construction such as a causative/applicative/ditransitive. It might cause a combination of persons to be ...
user325
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Which languages have Subject-object agreement in relative clauses?
I am working on relative clauses in Kyrgyz. Kyrgyz and some other Turkic languages show agreement of subject with object in relative clauses, instead of the verb. It is an SVO language.
Menin okugan ...
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What is the concept of verb agreement with passive-active level in Hebrew?
In this Duolingo discussion, 'S.Liebermann' mentions that in Hebrew and Arabic, "the verb needs to agree with the level of passive/active" and "Hebrew has 7 degrees of passive/active, while Arabic has ...
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Words being marked for agreement, and prepared speech
In some languages, words are marked for more things than in others.
This affects what information must be included in a sentence or passage. For example, someone saying "Do you want to come along ...
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What factors determine the numeral coming to numbers such as -1, 0, 0.5, 100% in a language which has and only has contrast in singular and plural?
I have searched by corpus and found variant results for the same number above. People also hesitate with these numbers and make different sortation. Is there any research about any psycolinguistical ...
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How does a language end up with ergative-absolutive alignment on nouns, but nominative-accusative in verb concord?
In Two Types of Ergative Agreement: Implications for Case (Coon, 2015), the author explains that there are broadly two different ways a language can be "ergative". One is that it can be ...
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Numeral-noun number agreement - how popular it is
I am interested in the feature of number agreement for simple cases of "several nouns" in various languages.
Some languages featuring this agreement are e.g. English or Slavic languages (I don't know ...
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Subject-verb number agreement with complex subject
There is a common language learner question for English (both native and non-native speakers) to wonder what kind of subject-verb number agreement to have when a sentence is complex. For example, ...
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My otherwise monogamous friends came to the party with their wives
Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese) tend to say that "My friends came with their wife, who were all blowing their nose." (no polygamy, a cold epidemic but no monstrosity either), ...
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Examples of languages that mark both nouns and adjectives for possessor
This question by Slavus asked two days ago has this comment by Janus Bahs Jacquet.
I think in languages that have case, even outside Indo-European, it is more common than not that at least ...
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Are there any languages where possessive nouns have to agree with the head noun?
I know there are plenty of languages out there where possessive personal pronouns can and do agree with the head noun in number and case. But I was wondering if there were any where nouns also had to ...
user19661
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Origin of the habitual tense in Swahili
How far back can a tense like hu, which fails to agree with its subject, be reconstructed in Swahili? Alternatively, do we know which construction it developed from?
This question is based on reading ...
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Subject/Complement Agreement. How to describe problem with "The thing is the objects."
In https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/29140/is-or-are-the-only-thing-that-i-want-you-to-hit-right-now-is-are-the-books/29170#29170, I provided the following, problematic, wording (especially ...
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In "half of the slices were eaten", how does the plurality of "slices" get projected past the preposition "of"?
in "half of the slices were eaten" the phrase "half of the slices" is clearly headed by "slices" as the verb the subject took are plural. however, "of" is a ...
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How do we explain the fact that agreement comes from the object with 'there'?
For example:
There is a man.
There are men.
How do we explain that agreement of the verb comes from the object in this case alone? What movement happens in the verb complex of the xbar tree of the ...
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What languages have extraction markers?
I'm looking for languages that have extraction markers or wh-agreement markers like those cited in Chung (1994) in Chamorro below:
The example shows wh-agreement morphology on the verb when the ...
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Plural-marking and numerals
Does anyone know how typologically common it is to have number agreement on nouns even when that noun's plurality is implied by numerals?
For instance, in Spanish "two houses" is "dos casas", i.e, ...
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Are there any languages where the dependent agrees with the head's intrinsic property?
In head-marking languages, the head usually takes the marking based on the dependent's intrinsic properties. For example, every English noun/pronoun has an intrinsic property of person: "bear&...
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Are there languages with agreement classes similar to gender but for other parts of speech?
Gender, at least in romance languages (but generally in many SAE languages), can be described briefly as an intrinsic lexical property of nouns that trigger an agreement in its dependents : a noun ...
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What's the gender of "nice" in "Mary is a nice person"?
I just read this rule in Greek Essential Grammar:
This passage says that, in the Greek sentence for "Mary is a nice person", the adjective nice is masculine because it must agree with the ...
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What should I do of inter-annotator agreement is below 100%?
I am currently working on an NLP project where I had to mark an initial list of words, giving a score of either 1 or 2 to each word in the list. I got the list marked by 2 people and found that the ...
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Is there a language where presence/absence of V-O agreement would reflect presence/absence of accusative case?
I am trying to find a language which would show the following pattern with respect to agreement/morphological Case:
presence of verb-object morphological agreement yields accusative morphology
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Inclusive/Exclusive Pronouns and Agreement Mismatch
The following data (taken from Adger's Core Syntax) show that certain forms cause mismatching agreement. The dual, in Hopi, triggers both singular and plural agreement.
Puma ta?taq-t wari
Those man-...
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What is the boundary of morphologically decided gender assignment and the phenomenon like a/an-distinction in English from a synchronic perspective?
And are there any examples in world's languages of the one mechanism developed into the other?
Grammatical gender is a specific form of noun class system in which
the division of noun classes ...
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How is T-subject agreement realized on a verb in minimalist syntax?
Consider the derivation of John eats the apples.
(1) [CP C [TP John T [v*P John v*-eats [VP eat [DP the apples]]]]]
[uφ] [φ] [uφ] [φ]
The bracket ...
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"Who lives there" vs "Who live there?" [closed]
I'm a bit confused as to the proper grammar when posing the following question.
"Who lives there?" <- seems to imply just one person
"Who live there?" <- seems to imply more than one person
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Scientific names taking "le" in French [migrated]
I am reading an old book, Description d'un Isopode nouveau: le Joeropsis brevicornis, which is the description of a small isopod. Joeropsis is properly a word that uses the Latinized Greek morpheme, -...
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Is "more than one" always treated as grammatically singular across languages with singular/plural?
In English, we say "more than one book is on the table," where "more than one" is treated as singular despite referring to a quantity greater than one. This pattern is also ...
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How can I write subject and predicate phrases so they can be interchanged for a multiple-choice test and still have subject-verb agreement?
I’m trying to write a large set of multiple-choice test questions that can easily be randomized by interchanging their subject phrases and predicate phrases. I’m having some difficulty finding verbs ...
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Their class has more singers than (we/us) -- possible syntactical derivations?
Forgive me if this is not the right sort of question to post here, but I was curious as to the derivation of the above sentence. (Apparently the correct choice is 'we').
Their class has more singers ...
user2194
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Why is participial clause tenseless?
Participles, among the non-finite verbal inventory, most often appear to be taken by linguists as being tenseless or having the feature [-tense]. This is due to their interaction only with the Aspect ...
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