Government and agreement

As we have seen, sentences are both ordered and hierarchically structured. In many languages, the relationships between elements within a phrase or sentence are formally marked. In English, for example, the form of the demonstrative adjectives this and that must agree with its noun for number:

This dog

These dogs

That house

Those houses

This marking of relationships is known as agreement or concord, and often affects items at some distance from each other in a sentence. In the following example, the third person singular form requests is required to mark agreement with the head of the complex subject noun phrase (boy):

The boy with the long unwashed hair whom you met at a party last Friday requests the pleasure of your daughter’s company.

Formal agreement marking in modern English is relatively limited: verbs, with the exception of to be, mark subject–verb agreement only for the third person singular of the present tense. But many other languages have rich and complex agreement systems. Hungarian verbs, for example, not only mark agreement with a subject but also indicate whether a direct object is definite or indefinite (data from Corbett 2006: 92):

. Egy könyv-et olvas-nak

a book-acc read-3pl-indef

They are reading a book

. Egy könyv-et olvas-sák

a book-acc read-3pl-def

They are reading the book

Note how the verbal suffix (in bold) changes when the object is definite.

A distinction needs to be drawn here between agreement and government (or rection). The difference can be illustrated with examples from Spanish:

1 El libro pequeño The small book

2 Los libros pequeños The small books

3 La casa pequeña The small house

4 Las casas pequeñas The small houses

In each case, the article and adjective are inflected for gender (masculine/feminine) and number (singular/plural). For number, this is a case of agreement: we are free to select either singular (1 and 3) or plural (2 and 4) for each noun phrase, and the noun and modifiers must be marked for the same number value. For gender, however, the values ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ are not a matter of choice: the value for this category is a fixed part of the lexical specification for Spanish nouns, which is then imposed on the modifiers. The noun is therefore said to govern the adjective for gender in Spanish. In similar vein, Latin verbs and prepositions were said to govern nouns for case: the preposition in (‘in’) governed ablative case when it referred to position, but accusative case when it indicated movement:

Caesar in urbe (abl) habitat Caesar lives in the city (Location)

Caesar in urbem (acc) ambulat Caesar walks into the city (Direction)

Both types of government involve inherent properties of the governing items, which have to be specified in the lexicon. In other words, a Spanish native speaker ‘knows’, albeit not necessarily in a conscious sense, that libro governs adjectives and determiners for masculine gender, just as speakers of Latin ‘knew’ that the preposition in governed nouns for accusative or ablative case.