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The consequences for agreement are thus: Verbs must agree in person and number, and sometimes in gender, with their subjects. Articles and adjectives must agree in case, number and gender with the nouns they modify. Sample Latin verb: the present indicative active of portare (portar), to carry: porto - I carry portas - you [singular] carry
When compound subjects are thought of as a single unit, a singular verb is used, e.g. Peanut butter and jelly is available in the cafeteria. [ 1 ] As shown in the examples, if the subjects are joined by or , the rules are often ill-defined, especially when two elements that differ in grammatical gender or grammatical number are coordinated.
Verbs may also be affected by agreement, polypersonal agreement, incorporation, noun class, noun classifiers, and verb classifiers. [4] Agglutinative and polysynthetic languages tend to have the most complex conjugations, although some fusional languages such as Archi can also have extremely complex conjugation.
For example, in Ancient Greek neuter plurals took a singular verb. [325] The plural form of a pronoun may also be applied to a single individual as a sign of importance, respect or generality, as in the pluralis majestatis , the T–V distinction , and the generic "you" , found in many languages, or, in English, when using the singular "they ...
The head of the subject noun phrase, "efforts", is plural, but the verb appears in a singular form because the local noun "language" in the interceding phrase is singular, and therefore attracts the production of the singular feature in "is". While Bock pointed to this example, it doesn't follow the more common pattern where the local nouns are ...
Different forms of English handle verb agreement with collective count nouns differently. For example, users of British English generally accept that collective nouns take either singular or plural verb forms depending on context and the metonymic shift that it implies, while in some other forms of English the verb agreement is less flexible.
In languages where the verb is inflected, it often agrees with its primary argument (the subject) in person, number or gender. With the exception of the verb to be, English shows distinctive agreements only in the third person singular, present tense form of verbs, which are marked by adding "-s" ( walks) or "-es" (fishes).
In the sentence The man sees the dog, the dog is the direct object of the verb "to see". In English, which has mostly lost grammatical cases, the definite article and noun – "the dog" – remain the same noun form without number agreement in the noun either as subject or object, though an artifact of it is in the verb and has number agreement, which changes to "sees".