CONCORD, also agreement. In GRAMMAR, the relationship between units in such matters as number, person, and gender: ‘They did the work themselves’ (number and person concord between they and themselves); ‘He did the work himself’ (number, person, and gender concord between he and him).
Lack of standard concord occurs in sentences like The books is on the table and I says do it but he don’t do it. Although ungrammatical in the standard language, such usage is consistent with the requirements of concord within some non-standard varieties.
Number and person concord
In standard English, number concord is most apparent between a singular or PLURAL subject and its verb in the third person of the simple present tense: That book seems interesting (singular: book agreeing with seems) and Those books seem interesting (plural: books agreeing with seem).
The verb be involves concord for the first person singular (I am, etc.) and uniquely among English verbs has different forms for singular and plural in the past (was, were).
Number concord, requiring that two related units should both be singular or both be plural, can involve complements and objects: That animal is an elk, Those animals are elks, I consider him a spoilsport, I consider them spoilsports. Both number and person concord are involved in the use of pronouns and possessives, as in ‘I hurt myself’ and ‘My friends said they were coming in their car’.
The Business plan on Book and Popular
1. Introduction Popular Holdings is a Singapore-based company that is listed on the Singapore Exchange. Popular is best known for its chain of Popular Bookstores under the Retail and Distribution unit. The Group currently carries out its publishing activities through subsidiaries operating in countries such as Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and Canada. Its bookstore operations have ...
Singular THEY
Controversy surrounds the use of they as a third-person singular pronoun, in defiance of number concord. It is common after indefinite pronouns: If someone puts themselves forward in showbiz, they should be prepared for exposure if they err (Observer, 18 Dec. 1988).
The practice is popular as a way of avoiding the alleged sexism of the traditional use of masculine pronouns and the awkwardness that often attends he or she phrases. It has a long history: ‘Here nobody hangs or drowns themselves’ ( Horace Walpole, 18c).
It can occur where a masculine or feminine word could be used: ‘He manages to think at least fifty years ahead, which for someone in their nineties is quite remarkable’ ( Prince Charles on the Earl of Stockton, Daily Telegraph, 22 Nov. 1985).
Some grammarians claim that the usage is informal; others use it freely in their own formal writing: ‘I have had a heart for years, but I would not know whether anyone else had a hole in theirs’ ( David Crystal, Linguistics, 1971).
Gender concord
This is an important part of the grammar of languages such as French or German, in which all nouns belong to a gender category, and articles and adjectives have to agree with them, as in the French une petite plume (a little pen), in which feminine agreement runs through the phrase, and un petit livre (a little book), in which the concord is masculine. In English, gender concord does not exist apart from personal and possessive pronouns, as in Mary hurt herself badly in the accident but my father only broke his glasses.
Notional concord
This stands in contrast to grammatical concord and means agreement by meaning rather than grammar, where the two are in conflict. In BrE, notional concord occurs when plural verbs are widely used with collective nouns: The Opposition seem divided among themselves; The committee have decided to increase the annual subscription. Some of the controversial uses of they can be accounted for in this way: Everybody has left now, haven’t they? In both BrE and AmE, singular verbs are usual with apparently plural forms that are notionally felt to be singular, as in: Fish and chips is no longer cheap; ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ is a classic novel; $50 was a lot to pay. Usage is divided in some areas. With various negative structures, some people favour grammatical, singular concord and others prefer notional, plural concord: Neither John nor Mary knows about it in contrast with Neither John nor Mary know about it, and None of the bodies so far recovered was wearing a life-jacket in contrast with None of the bodies so far recovered were wearing life-jackets.
The Term Paper on Gender and Number Systems of English and Bangla
English language, number and gender are the major elements of secondary category. They have some individual character traits and features of their own, which make them different than the number and gender systems of other languages. Therefore automatically there comes the issue of compare and contrast them with other languages. In this assignment paper, I will present a detail compare and contrast ...
Proximity concord
Clauses as subjects are usually treated as singular: To err is human; That you don’t agree upsets me. With long noun phrases, the head word is relevant for number concord, as in One of your friends is here, not *One of your friends are here, and He is one of those people who always interfere, not *He is one of those people who always interferes, but in the heat of creation the concord in such constructions is often overlooked. In such cases, proximity concord operates, the verb agreeing with the nearest noun. It can also operate in awkward constructions like *Neither my sister nor I am going and occurs in the traditional use of a singular verb after More than one, where both grammar and meaning require a plural verb: More than one person has remarked on this strange fact.
Concord is agreement in gender, case, number or person between different words that share a reference. For example, if a sentence contains a proper noun “Paul” and somewhat later a pronoun “he,” and they refer to the same person, we say that they agree in number (for both are singular) and gender (for both are masculine).
As speakers or writers of a language we experience concord as a set of rules to learn and follow (and sometimes complain about).
As listeners or readers we recognize that concord helps us decode sentences. In this passage
Elizabeth Bennet had been obliged, by the scarcity of gentlemen, to sit down for two dances; and during part of that time, Mr Darcy had been standing near enough for her to overhear a conversation between him and Mr Bingley, who came from the dance for a few minutes, to press his friend to join it.
two grammatical rules help us to determine the reference of the pronouns “her,” “him” and “his.” The first of these is that a pronoun must agree with its antecedent in gender and number; this rule associates “her” with Elizabeth Bennet (rather than Darcy, who would otherwise be a possible antecedent) and prevents our associating “him” or “his” with Elizabeth Bennet. The second is that a pronoun must be associated with the most recent possible antecedent; by this rule we understand “his friend” to mean “Bingley’s friend” rather than “Darcy’s friend.”
The Term Paper on English as an International Language
This paper is intended to raise awareness on the aspects which define English as an international language, by examining the characteristics of an international language, the number of users, how it spread to reach global status, what factors may impede its continued spread and what dangers are involved in the development of English as an international language. English’s international status is ...
We work out the reference of the pronouns in a passage like the one above without conscious effort. Indeed the Modern English rules of concord are few and relatively simple:
The subject must agree with its verb in person and number. For most Modern English verbs this simply means that we must remember that a third-person singular subject generally takes a special verb form ending in -s. The verb to be, however, distinguishes all three persons in the present singular (I am, you are, she is) and the second person in the past singular (I was, you were, he was).
The pronoun must agree with its antecedent in gender and number. If you speak of a woman named Ruth in one clause and then in the next clause want to refer to her with a pronoun, the pronoun must be both feminine and singular.
The pronouns that and this, when used adjectivally, must agree in number with the nouns they modify: that wolf, those wolves; this horse, these horses. These pronominal adjectives are not inflected for gender.
The first two Modern English rules of concord are largely the same as in Old English. The third Modern English rule is a remnant of an Old English rule that a noun and all its modifiers (adjectives and pronouns used adjectivally) must agree in gender, case and number. All three of these rules are a little more complex in Old English than in Modern English, so you will have to pay careful attention to the rules of concord–at first, anyway.
11.2. Subject and verb
The Old English verb must agree with its subject in person and number. The Old English finite verb always distinguished number and often distinguished person, and this relatively great degree of expressiveness can help you locate hard-to-find subjects, as here:
The Homework on Main Verb Noun Person Pronoun
A common noun is a general name for a person, place, thing, or idea. A proper noun names a particular person, place, thing, or idea. A concrete noun names an object perceived through the senses; an abstract noun names something that cannot be perceived with the senses. A collective noun names a group of people or things. A compound noun contains two or more words. Ex. : Common Nouns avenue, city, ...
Þæt wæs yldum cūþ,
þæt hīe ne mōste, þā Metod nolde,
se scynscaþa under sceadu breġdan. [Beowulf, ll. 705-7.]
[It was known to men
that the demonic foe could not, if God did not wish it,
drag them under the shadows.]
In the noun clause that begins in the second line of this passage, the nominative/accusative third-person plural pronoun hīe comes before the verb mōste ‘could’, where Modern English grammar leads us to expect the subject. But the verb is plainly singular, so plural hīe cannot be the subject. Looking further, we find the nominative singular noun phrase se scynscaþa ‘the demonic foe’; this is the subject.
A verb’s personal ending is actually a statement or restatement of the subject, conveying much of the information that a personal pronoun can convey. In fact, in situations where Modern English uses a pronoun subject, the Old English finite verb can sometimes express the subject all by itself: [Passages from The Battle of Maldon, l. 62, Beowulf, l. 301, and Cædmon’s Hymn, l. 1.]
Hēt þā bord beran, beornas gangan
[(He) then commanded the men to bear their shields (and) to go]
Ġewiton him þā fēran
[Then (they) departed traveling]
Nū sculon heriġean heofonrīċes Weard
[Now (we) must praise the Guardian of the kingdom of heaven]
In these fragments, the subjects of the verbs hēt ‘commanded’, ġewiton ‘departed’ and sculon ‘must’ are unexpressed, but context and the form of the verb together give us enough information to figure them out for ourselves.
Compound subjects may may be split in Old English, one part divided from the others by the verb or some other sentence element. When this happens, the verb will typically agree with the first part of the subject. Consider these sentences:
Hēr Henġest ond Horsa fuhton wiþ Wyrtgeorne þām cyninge
[Here Hengest and Horsa fought with King Vortigern]
Hēr cuōm Ælle on Bretenlond ond his þrīe suna, Cymen ond Wlenċing ond Ċissa
The Essay on 20 Rules of Subject Verb Agreement
1. Use verbs that agree with a subject, not with a noun that is part of a modifying phrase or clause between verb and subject: “The pot of eggs is boiling on the stove.” 2. Use singular or plural verbs that agree with the subject, not with the complement of the subject: “My favorite type of movie is comedies,” but “Comedies are my favorite type of movie.” 3. Use singular verbs with singular ...
[Here Ælle and his three sons, Cymen and Wlencing and Cissa, came to Britain]
In the first, the compound subject is arranged as in Modern English and the verb (fuhton) is plural. In the second, however, the first part of the compound subject, Ælle, is divided from the other parts by a prepositional phrase (on Bretenlond ‘to Britain’), and the verb (cuōm, an archaic form of cōm ‘came’) is singular. A spectacular example of this sort of construction is at the beginning of Riddle 46:
Wer sæt æt wīne mid his wīfum twām
ond his twēġen suno ond his twā dohtor,
swāse ġesweostor, ond hyra suno twēġen,
frēolicu frumbearn.
To the Modern English eye it looks as if Wer ‘A man’ is the sole subject of the singular verb sæt ‘sat’, and that everything following mid ‘with’ is part of a long prepositional phrase (“with his two wives and his two sons . . .”).
But in fact the whole of the prepositional phrase is mid his wīfum twām; everything that follows is nominative and therefore part of a compound subject. The correct translation (rearranging the sentence so that the parts of the subject come together) is as follows: “A man, his two sons, his two daughters (beloved sisters), and their two sons (noble first-borns) sat at wine with his two wives.”
11.3. Pronoun and antecedent
A pronoun typically restates a noun, called its antecedent; it must agree with this antecedent in gender and number. [When a pronoun is used as an adjective, it obeys the rule for modifiers rather than the rule for pronouns.] Modern English pronouns obey the same rule, but the Old English rule behaves a little differently because of the way the language handles gender. Consider this passage:
Sēo sunne gǣð betwux heofenan and eorðan. On ðā healfe ðe hēo scīnð þǣr bið dæġ, and on ðā healfe ðe hēo ne scīnð þǣr bið niht.
[The sun goes between heaven and earth. On the side where it shines there is day, and on the side where it does not shine there is night.]
Students sometimes ask whether the use of the feminine pronoun hēo to refer to the sun means that it is being personified. It doesn’t mean that at all; rather, the pronoun is simply agreeing with the feminine noun sunne ‘sun’ and must be translated ‘it’, not ‘she’.
The Report on Jimmy’s Pronoun Problems
Rocha 1 Vanessa Rocha Professor Sabir English 1A, 8AM Class 21 February 2011 Jimmy’s Pronoun Problems Stewart Pidd Hates English contains the following information about pronouns; Pronouns function as replacement words for long phrases and nouns. Three common types of pronoun that give writers trouble are personal, possessive, and indefinite. Pronouns have different types: pronouns that do not ...
On the other hand, when the pronoun refers to a human being, it will very likely take on the “natural gender” of its antecedent rather than its grammatical gender:
Abrames wīf wæs ðā ġȳt wuniġende būtan ċildum, and hēo hæfde āne þīnene, ðā Eġyptiscan Agar.
[Abraham’s wife continued still to be without children, and she had a maid-servant, the Egyptian Agar.]
The grammatical gender of wīf is neuter, but the pronoun hēo, which refers to it, is feminine.
When a pronoun anticipates the noun it refers to, it may appear as neuter singular, regardless of the gender and number of the noun. We do something like this in Modern English:
Who’s there? It’s Bob.
A famous Old English example comes near the beginning of Beowulf (l. 11):
þæt wæs gōd cyning!
[that was a good king!]
where we get neuter singular þæt instead of masculine singular se. A stranger example is in a passage quoted below, Þæt synt fēower sweras ‘They are four columns’, where the same pronoun refers to a masculine plural noun.
11.4. Noun and modifiers
A noun and all its modifiers must agree in gender, case and number. Though this rule has all but disappeared in Modern English, it is very important in Old English. Every time a demonstrative pronoun is used as an “article,” for example, it agrees with its noun:
Þā þæs on merġen se mæsseprēost ābēad þæs mǣdenes word þām mǣran bisceope . . .
[When, the morning after, the priest reported the virgin’s words to the famous bishop . . .]
Here the demonstrative is used three times to modify a noun:
se mæsseprēost: masculine nominative singular
þæs mǣdenes: neuter genitive singular
þām mǣran bisceope: masculine dative singular
and each time, it matches its noun exactly in gender, case and number. What is true of pronouns is equally true of adjectives:
Ðā ārison sōna of þām sweartan flocce twēġen eġesliċe dēoflu mid īsenum tōlum.
[Then from that dark company two terrifying devils instantly arose with iron tools.]
Here the adjectives agree with their nouns as follows:
þām sweartan flocce: masculine dative singular
twēġen eġesliċe dēoflu: masculine [In a rare anomaly, the plural of dēofol ‘devil’ is neuter in form, but may agree with either masculine or neuter pronouns and adjectives.] nominative plural
īsenum tōlum: neuter dative plural
The adjective is frequently separated from its noun, especially in poetry. When this happens, the rules of concord will help you to match up the adjective with its noun:
Slōh ðā wundenlocc
þone fēondsceaðan fāgum mēċe,
heteþoncolne, þæt hēo healfne forċearf
þone swūran him. [Judith, ll. 103-6.]
[Then the wavy-haired one struck
the hostile-minded enemy with a decorated sword,
so that she cut through half
of his neck.
In the main clause of this sentence, þone fēondsceaðan ‘the enemy’ is the direct object of the verb slōh ‘struck’. We can tell by its ending that the adjective heteþoncolne ‘hostile-minded’, in the next line, agrees with accusative fēondsceaðan; since an adjective normally comes before its noun in Modern English, we must move it in our translation, making a noun phrase “the hostile-minded enemy.” In the clause of result that follows (þæt hēo . . . swūran him), the adjective healfne ‘half’ agrees with þone swūran ‘the neck’, though it is separated from it by the verb forċearf ‘cut through’. Once again we must gather the fragments of a noun phrase in our translation: “half of his neck.”
Past and present participles are often inflected as adjectives, even when they form periphrastic verb forms:
ēowre ġefēran þe mid þām cyninge ofslæġene wǣrun
[your companions who were slain with the king]
Dryhten, hwænne ġesāwe wē þē hingriġendne oððe þyrstendne?
[Lord, when did we see you hungering or thirsting?]
Here the participles ofslæġene, hingriġendne and þyrstendne all have adjective endings.
When participles are inflected, the -e of the nominative/accusative plural past participle is used with all genders and may occasionally be omitted. Feminine nominative singular -u also may be omitted.
11.5. Bad grammar?
It is probably fair to say that the schools of Anglo-Saxon England offered little or no instruction in Old English grammar and that vernacular texts generally did not pass through the hands of copy editors on their way to “publication.” Old English was an unpoliced language for which “correct” grammar was governed by usage rather than by the authority of experts. Under these circumstances we should expect to find what look to the rigorously trained modern grammarian rather like errors. Consider this passage, for example, by a learned author:
Þæt synt fēower sweras, þā synd þus ġeċīġed on Lȳden: iustitia, þæt ys rihtwīsnys; and ōðer hātte prudentia, þæt ys snoternys; þridde ys temperantia, þæt ys ġemetgung; fēorðe ys fortitudo, þæt ys strengð.
[They (the cardinal virtues) are four columns, which are called thus in Latin: iustitia, or righteousness; and the second is called prudentia, or prudence; the third is temperantia, or temperance; the fourth is called fortitudo, or strength.]
Notice the sequence of ordinal numbers here: ōðer, þridde, fēorðe. The first of these could be any gender, but þridde and fēorðe have the neuter/feminine weak nominative singular ending -e. They do not agree in gender with masculine sweras, their grammatical antecedent, but rather with feminine nouns such as rihtwīsnys and snoternys. Editors of an earlier age tended to “fix” such “errors”; modern editors, on the other hand, are more likely to conclude that what looks like “bad grammar” to us did not necessarily look so to the Anglo-Saxons. If the text is readable, there is little reason to emend.
Another example of what we are talking about comes at Beowulf, ll. 67-70, where Hrothgar decides to build his great hall Heorot:
Him on mōd bearn
þæt healreċed hātan wolde,
medoærn miċel men ġewyrċean
þone yldo bearn ǣfre ġefrūnon
[It came into his mind
that he would command men to build
a hall–a great mead-hall
which the children of men would always hear about]
Here the problem is with þone in the last line, which looks as if it should be a masculine relative pronoun ‘which’, but does not agree in gender with the nearest antecedent, neuter medoærn ‘mead-hall’. Early editors emended þone to þon[n]e ‘than’, creating yet another problem by positing an “unexpressed comparative.” The better solution is to recognize that writers of Old English were less punctilious than we are about concord. Further, masculine nouns are more common in Old English than either feminines or neuters; when you find an otherwise unmotivated disagreement of gender, it is likely to involve a shift from feminine or neuter to masculine.
Do not get carried away with finding “errors” in the Old English texts you read. Violations of the rules of concord are relatively rare, and generally you will be able to see why they happened, as in the examples above.
