But we are lucky that two grammatical majorities have an answer to these enigmatic questions. We start and we work on the most difficult issues. Today`s guest author, Bonnie Trenga, tells us that this is called the subject-supplementary agreement. A complement – it is p-l-i-m-e-n-t – is a noun that completes the meaning (1). Take the phrase “ She`s my sister.“ The words „my sister“ are the complement. There is no problem of concordance in this sentence, everything is singular, but what about a sentence like this: „The two girls ate their sandwich“? Does this mean that the girls shared a sandwich or did they each have a sandwich? A rare type of chord that phonologically copies parts of the head instead of corresponding to a grammatical category. [4] For example in Bainouk: Difficult cases of subject-verb concordance in number are described below. The verb BE has more forms for correspondence with the subject in person and number: I am; he/she; us/them; is my brother. Are my brothers; I/he/she; we/they were; was my brother; My brothers were. Adjectives correspond to gender and number with nouns that modify them in French. As with verbs, chords are sometimes displayed only in spelling, because forms written with different formulas are sometimes pronounced in the same way (z.B. pretty, pretty); although, in many cases, the final consonant is pronounced in feminine forms, but mute in masculine forms (for example. B Small vs.
Small). Most plural forms end on -s, but this consonant is pronounced only in connecting contexts, and these are determinants that help to understand whether the singular or plural is targeted. In some cases, verb participations correspond to the subject or object. There are also matches in the number. For example: Vitabu viwili vitatosha (Two books will be enough), Michungwa miwili itatosha (Two orange trees will be enough), Machungwa mawili yatatosha (Two oranges will be enough). In the case of verbs, gender conformity is less prevalent, although it may still occur. For example, in the past French compound, in certain circumstances, the past part corresponds to the subject or an object (see past compound for details). In Russian and most other Slavic languages, the form of the past in sex corresponds to the subject. In a sentence, a possessive pronoun in person, number, and sex must correspond to the noun or pronoun to which it relates. Typical agreement templates are shown in the following examples. Concordance usually involves the concordance of the value of a grammatical category between different elements of a sentence (or sometimes between sentences, as in some cases where a pronoun is needed to match its predecessor or speaker).
Some categories that often trigger grammatical concordance are listed below. There is also a correspondence in sex between pronouns and precursors. Examples of this can be found in English (although English pronouns mainly follow natural sex and not grammatically sex): we encounter the same problem with the phrase „Both men relied heavily on their wives“ (3). If we wrote, „Both men relied heavily on their wives,“ it would indicate that the men shared a woman; When we say „wives“, it indicates that every man has more than one wife. It`s a lose-lose situation. As Garner notes, „sometimes neither the singular nor the plural can prevent ambiguity“ (2). So we turn to the second grammar source we`re looking at today, Barbara Walraffs Word Court. Most Slavic languages are very volatile, with the exception of Bulgarian and Macedonian….