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:

*(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')


 * Agreement of verb with subject noun phrase:

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')

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.

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

Link

 * Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics

Other languages

 * German Kongruenz
 * Russian согласование
 * Czech shoda