Agreement in English is a grammatical indication that two or more adjacent words share part of their meaning with each other. A well-known example is the “subject-verb” chord, where a verb has a singular or plural form, according to which of these two meanings is present in a noun or pronoun that is its subject. This is the opposite of sentences that contain the indefinite article “a” – as in “a number of X” – where the head of such a sentence is “of X” and the modifier is “a number”. Since the object of the preposition will be the plural, the rule of Huddleston and Pullum is that the next verb will be plural. The effect of having the whole expression “number of X” with the determinant “the” or “a” is essential to understand what is being said. If part of the phrase “a/number” or X-alone has been specified, a Wh-word question can be expected. For example, if you said, “Wow, the number really skyrocketed. The answer might be, “What has skyrocketed? (Number of what?) Similarly, if you were to say, “The test sites have really grown. Another person might ask, “How many test sites have been expanded? These scenarios illustrate the dependence of components in the phrase “number of X” – regardless of the determinant used, “number” aims to describe something, where that something is X. And X, although it can be considered a noun on its own, needs the context of the “number” to describe a quantity. In this blog, the agreement is the main topic of another article (12th choice of singular and plural verbs), and is also discussed in 28.
Pronoun errors (#5) and 214/138. Test your 1 & 2 grammar skills. However, these are not complete surveys of correspondence in English. Here I would like to conduct such an investigation, in the hope that it will help at least some of those who are still struggling with one or the other of the different types of contracts. Some pronouns, for example all, someone, enough and more, always have the same shape. However, many others change their shape based on a name they represent. The change may indicate “number” (singular/plural), “gender”, “case” (subject/object) or “person” (speaker/recipient/other person). Examples: “The agreement also occurs in English between the demonstratives and the names. A demonstrative must match its name in number. So with a plural noun as books, you have to use a plural this or that to get those books or books.
With a singular noun, such as . B book, you use a singular this or that, giving this or that book. These books or books would not be grammatical because the demonstrative does not correspond to the name. – James R. Hurford, Grammar: A Guide for Students. Cambridge University Press, 1994 The preference for expressions that contain “the”, as in “the number of X” to take “is”, comes from the fact that the head is “the number”. This is because the word “number” is singular, suggesting that the copula would also prefer to be singular (i.e. take the form “is”).
The modifier in the expression “the number of X” is actually “of X”. “of X” simply indicates what “the number” refers to. Without the modifier, you might ask, “The number of what?” What prompted you to look for the number agreement? Please let us know where you read or heard it (including the quote if possible). Huddleston and Pullum (2005) write “the verb coincides with the subject” (p. 31), and to quantify nouns, “the form of the verb depends on . NP [noun expression], which is complementary to the preposition of , where “[t]he meaning of the number is such that the embedded NP must be plural” (p. 89). Therefore, the conclusion that huddleston and Pullum draw is that the verb that corresponds to the quantization of NPs must correspond to the plural complement of the quantifying noun. Overall, there appear to be three main types of combinations for which there is agreement. In addition to verbs and their subjects, we find some adjective words that correspond to a noun that usually follows them but sometimes precedes them, and pronouns that correspond to nouns or their equivalents.
Each of these types has characteristics that can be barriers to success in reading and/or writing. “Number Agreement Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/number%20agreement. Accessed November 27, 2020. Match is one of those elementary areas of English grammar with which many advanced learners such as commas and capital letters still make regular mistakes. This is probably partly explained by the fact that the concept of agreement actually covers a fairly wide range of different structures. As a result, different aspects tend to be presented at different times, making it more difficult for learners to make useful connections with each other, and there are many places where mistakes are likely. Subject-verb match rules also sometimes help show whether a word in a text is a verb or not. For example, if we see the combination of the price increase, we will know by the absence of a ending on the increase that it must be a noun, since a verb with price should be increased as a singular subject. If the elevation is a noun, the price must be a noun that describes it as an adjective (see 38 nouns used as adjectives) – and the verb of the sentence will be elsewhere. When referring to groups or general names, you should pay special attention to the number and correspondence between the sexes. The conclusion: verb matching is not only motivated by the previous topic. .