[uh-gree-muh
nt] 
| 1. | the act of agreeing or of coming to a mutual arrangement. |
| 2. | the state of being in accord. |
| 3. | an arrangement that is accepted by all parties to a transaction. |
| 4. | a contract or other document delineating such an arrangement. |
| 5. | unanimity of opinion; harmony in feeling: agreement among the members of the faculty. |
| 6. | Grammar. correspondence in number, case, gender, person, or some other formal category between syntactically connected words, esp. between one or more subordinate words and the word or words upon which they depend; selection by one word of the matching formal subclass, or category, in another word syntactically construed with the first. |
| 7. | collective agreement. |
| 8. | Law.
|
| a·gree·ment (ə-grē'mənt) n.
Our Living Language : Speakers of vernacular dialects of English sometimes use constructions that do not conform to the standard pattern of subject-verb agreement, such as She walk, People goes, and Pat and Terry likes the new movie. The standard pattern calls for an -s ending on present-tense verbs with third-person singular subjects (such as the teacher or he/she/it) and no ending on verbs with any other kind of subject. Vernacular speakers smooth out this slight irregularity in one of two ways: They use -s endings for all persons and numbers (for example, I/you/she/we/they walks), or they use no inflection at all (for example, I/you/she/we/they go). The tendency to regularize agreement patterns is not confined to today's vernacular dialect speakers. Subject-verb agreement has gotten progressively less complicated throughout the development of English, and today's standard pattern is far simpler and more regular than the system used in older varieties of English, in which all verbs took person/number endings, in both present and past tense. Vernacular speakers who use patterns such as she go or the students walks are actively carrying on the historic tradition of simplifying agreement patterns. · Some vernacular subject-verb patterns retain historic patterns that have long faded out of general American English use. For example, speakers of Scotch-Irish heritage, including those who speak Appalachian and Ozark English, tend to preserve an agreement pattern in which the -s inflection is used more often with third-person plural subjects that refer to a group or collection of people or things than with other third-person plurals. These speakers are more likely to say People walks or A lot of them walks than The men walks or Five dogs barks. See Note at be. |
A requirement for parts of a sentence in standard written English; the parts must agree, for example, in number and person.
The subject and verb of a clause or simple sentence must agree in person, as in “He is a boy.” The subject, he, and the verb, is, are both in the third person. The subject and verb also must agree in number, as in “We are girls.” The subject, we, and the verb, are, are both plural.
Nouns and pronouns must also agree in number, person, and gender as in “Every boy must mind his manners.” The noun boy and the pronoun his are both singular, both in the third person, and both masculine.
