Languages & Linguistics
Agreement
Agreement refers to the grammatical relationship between two or more words in a sentence. It involves the use of inflectional markers to indicate agreement in gender, number, person, or case. Agreement is an important aspect of language structure and helps to convey meaning and clarity in communication.
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4 Key excerpts on "Agreement"
eBook - PDF- Igor Mel'cuk, David Beck(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
2) Agreement, government and congruence are defined here on the basis of syn-thesis rules of a formal linguistic model rather than on the basis of observable distribution of grammatical markers, i.e., not on the basis of cooccurrence or covariance of inflectional characteristics, as is currently done. Of course, the synthesis rules themselves take into consideration the distribution of the ele-ments in question; nevertheless, proceeding from the rules (the approach fol-lowed as well in Iomdin 1990) gives quite a different perspective. 3. Agreement General problems of Agreement are discussed in depth in Moravcsik 1978b, Leh-man 1982, Corbett 1983, 1986, Lapointe 1985, Barlow and Ferguson 1988, and 58 Chapter 1. Agreement, government, congruence Brentari et al . 1988. Apresjan 1982 proposes a theoretical analysis of difficulties related to the distinction between Agreement and government; the first attempt at a rigorous definition is presented in Mel’ uk 1993a (see as well Mel’ uk 1993-2000, vol. 3: 266 – 270). Barlow 1992: 98 ff discusses the links between agree-ment and the structure of discourse. Finally, Schmidt and Lehfeldt 1995 give a comprehensive review of problems involved in the description of Agreement. 3.1. The concept of Agreement Definition 1.4: Agreement We say that, in an utterance U , a wordform w 1 which morphologically depends on wordform w 2 with respect to an inflectional category C 1 agrees with w 2 with respect to C 1 if and only if the following two conditions are simultaneously satisfied: 1) the wordform w 1 is not a substitute pronoun that replaces an occurrence of w 2 in U ; 2) the grammeme g 1 ( w 1 ) , where g 1 C 1 , is selected depending: (a) either upon a grammeme g 2 ( w 2 ) , where g 2 C 2 , such that C 1 mirrors C 2 ; (b) or upon the value of a syntactic feature 2 of w 2 , this 2 being Agreement class, (pronominal) person or (pronominal) number; (c) or upon some semantic components of w 2 or some properties of its referent in U .
eBook - PDF- Ranko Matasović(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Basically, the development of verbal Agreement is a prag- matically well-motivated and common phenomenon, while the development of adnominal Agreement occurs only if certain pre-conditions are met. It involves the copying and spread of a pre-existent syntactic process from one domain (the clause) to another (the NP), and it may be triggered both by internal pro- cesses in a language and by syntactic borrowing; the latter scenario is probably responsible for the areally limited distribution of languages with adnominal Agreement among the languages of the world. Over the last couple of decades, the number of good descriptive grammars of languages spoken by small communities in faraway places has increased dramatically. Thanks to the efforts of many field linguists, we now know more about linguistic diversity in general, and also about how languages can differ in terms of a single feature, or a set of related features, such as the presence and functioning of an Agreement system. However, researchers tend to focus on individual languages and on how such languages contribute to linguistic typology. Therefore, larger patterns and empirical generalizations are in danger of being left unnoticed. After all, the task of science is not just the observation and recording of facts but the discovery of patterns and rules connecting those facts and explaining why those patterns and rules exist in the first place. There is still a lot of work that needs to be done before we can fully appreciate all of the general patterns in the distribution of linguistic features, let alone under- stand why those patterns exist and how they came into being. But this book is, hopefully, a modest effort in that direction.
eBook - PDF- Marcel den Dikken(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
It can be a fascinating challenge to try to work out the exact case-marking and Agreement rules for particular languages, and see how they relate to each other and to other aspects of the syntax. We can take this then to be the central question that the theories of Agreement and case are concerned with, and it provides the primary focus for this chapter. 17.2 The syntax of Agreement Let us begin by considering Agreement in more detail. Virtually all gener- ative treatments begin with subject–verb Agreement, for reasons that are easy to understand. First, this is the most common kind, being found in almost 75 percent of languages sampled (266/378 in Siewierska 2005, 79/108 in Baker 2008b), whereas object Agreement is only found in some 50 percent (54/108 in Baker 2008b). Second, there seems to be a typological (near-) universal, such that a language does not have Agreement with direct objects unless it also has Agreement with (at least some) subjects (e.g., Croft 1990:106). 2 Third, subject Agreement is the only kind found in the most accessible and best-studied languages (e.g., IE), where generative linguists have typically started. The question arises, then, what is the true nature of Agreement, such that grammatical subjects do Agreement particularly well. 17.2.1 The fundamental nature of Agreement 17.2.1.1 What undergoes Agreement? As a preliminary to answering this, we need to be more precise about just what syntactic element is agreeing with the subject. It may not be the verb, precisely, because not all verbs agree in IE languages. Rather only tense- marked, finite verbs agree, as in (6). (6) a. I expect Mary to come/*comes b. I hope that Mary comes/*come Similarly, in auxiliary-plus-participle constructions containing more than one verbal element, subject Agreement in IE languages appears only on the auxiliary verb – the same one that is inflected for tense: 610 M A R K C . B A K E R
eBook - PDFSign Language
An International Handbook
- Roland Pfau, Markus Steinbach, Bencie Woll, Roland Pfau, Markus Steinbach, Bencie Woll(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
If it turns out that there is a condition (however it is formulated) on the process of Agreement, as argued by Janis (1992), Meir (1998), and Rathmann and Mathur (2008), this would be one instance in which verb Agreement in sign languages differs from that in spoken lan-guages. 5 . Conclusion: Agreement in sign and spoken languages We now go back to the questions raised at the beginning and consider how sign lan-guages compare with one another and with spoken languages with respect to the reali-zation of person and number features or the lack thereof. The preceding sections sug-gest the following picture. With regard to similarities across signed and spoken languages, the requirement that the set of person and number features of the arguments be realized in some way appears to be universal. The realization of person and number features can be ex-plained through an Agreement process that is common to both modalities. The agree-ment process, as well as the features underlying the process, may be made available by universal principles of grammar, so that it appears in both signed and spoken lan-guages. At the same time, there are important differences between signed and spoken lan-guages with regard to Agreement. First, the Agreement process in sign languages is restricted to a smaller set of verbs, whereas Agreement in spoken languages, if it is marked at all, is usually marked on the whole set of verbs (setting aside exceptions). 7. Verb Agreement 153 This cross-modal difference could be resolved if the Agreement process in sign lan-guages is understood to be one of several distinct Agreement processes available to sign languages, and that the choice of a particular Agreement process depends on the argument structure of the verb. If that is the case, and if one takes into account that there are likewise restrictions on the Agreement process in many spoken languages (Corbett 2006), sign languages are no different to spoken languages in this regard.
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