Agreement (linguistics)

A grammatical dependency in which one expression’s form covaries with person, number, gender, case or another feature of a related controller.

Version

v1 · 2026-09-08 · History

Domain-specific #

3232

Origin domain

morphosyntax

Subdomain

morphosyntax

Aliases

Concord

Core Idea

Agreement may be syntactic, semantic or default, can target verbs, adjectives, determiners or pronouns and differs from government because the controller supplies a matching value rather than merely assigning a fixed form. A controller bears or determines grammatical features, dependency and locality rules identify a target and morphology realizes corresponding feature values, with resolution rules handling coordination and mismatches. The abstraction is therefore identified by a declared carrier, a transformation or constraint over that carrier, and an invariant that tells an analyst whether the named structure is genuinely present.

Scope of Application

Agreement (linguistics) belongs to morphosyntax and is useful where the analyst can specify the typed morphosyntax carrier, including objects, relations, parameters, conventions, evidence, boundaries, and comparison targets, then evaluate the language and construction, controller and target, syntactic relation and domain, agreement feature and possible values, overt exponents, direction and locality, default or resolution rules, semantic or notional exceptions and corpus or elicited evidence are explicit. The scope is broad within that domain but bounded by the need for the language and construction, controller and target, syntactic relation and domain, agreement feature and possible values, overt exponents, direction and locality, default or resolution rules, semantic or notional exceptions and corpus or elicited evidence are explicit.

Clarity

The abstraction clarifies a crowded vocabulary by making the language and construction, controller and target, syntactic relation and domain, agreement feature and possible values, overt exponents, direction and locality, default or resolution rules, semantic or notional exceptions and corpus or elicited evidence are explicit the center of the account. A claim should name the carrier, the governing operation or relation, the applicable assumptions, and the recognition test.

Manages Complexity

Without the abstraction, an analyst must reason directly over many local details: the carrier roles, admissibility assumptions, competing conventions, derived invariants, boundary cases, and proof or validation obligations specific to Agreement (linguistics). Agreement (linguistics) compresses them into the roles in the structural signature. That compression permits comparison across instances without erasing the variables that determine validity. It also exposes which details may be varied safely and which are constitutive.

Abstract Reasoning

1. Identify the carrier. State what the elements, states, objects, or observations are: the typed morphosyntax carrier, including objects, relations, parameters, conventions, evidence, boundaries, and comparison targets. Reject examples whose alleged carrier belongs to a different problem. 2. Lock the constitutive rule. Express the language and construction, controller and target, syntactic relation and domain, agreement feature and possible values, overt exponents, direction and locality, default or resolution rules, semantic or notional exceptions and corpus or elicited evidence are explicit independently of one notation or implementation.

Knowledge Transfer

Knowledge transfers strongly among subfields of morphosyntax because they reuse the typed morphosyntax carrier, including objects, relations, parameters, conventions, evidence, boundaries, and comparison targets, A controller bears or determines grammatical features, dependency and locality rules identify a target and morphology realizes corresponding feature values, with resolution rules handling coordination and mismatches., and type the carrier, state every parameter and convention in the definition, test that the language and construction, controller and target, syntactic relation and domain, agreement feature and possible values, overt exponents, direction and locality, default or resolution rules, semantic or notional exceptions and corpus or elicited evidence are explicit, compare the nearest accepted identity, and report counterexamples, uncertainty, and limiting cases.

Relationships to Other Abstractions

Current abstraction Agreement (linguistics) Domain-specific

Parents (1) — more general patterns this builds on

• Agreement (linguistics) is a kind of Dependency Prime

  The proposed strict upward parent is prime:dependency.

Hierarchy path (1) — routes to 1 parentless root

• Agreement (linguistics) → Dependency

Neighborhood in Abstraction Space

Agreement (linguistics) sits in a crowded region of the domain-specific corpus (7^th percentile for distinctiveness): several abstractions share nearly its structure, so a description that fits it tends to fit its neighbors too.

Family — Grammar, Reference & Linguistic Structure (30 abstractions)

Nearest neighbors

• Polypersonal agreement — 0.96
• Marker (linguistics) — 0.94
• Locative case — 0.94
• Morphological parsing — 0.93
• Direct case — 0.92

Computed from structural-signature embeddings · 2026-09-08