| 词组 | agreement |
| 释义 | agreement In this book agreement usually refers to either the agreement in number between the subject and verb of a sentence, or to the agreement in number between a pronoun and its antecedent. The term concord, used by some American and many British writers, can be considered a synonym; it turns up here and there in various articles, especially in the terms notional concord and formal (or grammatical) concord. There are, in fact, two kinds of agreement in English: • There are two kinds of concord: formal concord, in which there is harmony of form, and notional concord, in which there is harmony of meaning. In such a sentence as "Two boys were in the room," we have both formal and notional concord, the subject and the verb both being plural in both form and meaning. But sometimes we have notional concord only, as "None were left," where the subject, though singular in form, takes a plural verb because it is plural in meaning; and sometimes we have formal concord only, as "Everybody was late," where the subject, though plural in meaning, takes a singular verb because it is singular in form —Paul Roberts, Understanding Grammar, 1954 It appears that in early modern English the pull of notional agreement (or concord) was very strong. McKnight 1928, after quoting sentences from the 17th-century writers Francis Bacon, Thomas Browne, and John Milton, says: • The grammatical number in pronoun or verb is determined by the number, plural or singular, of the idea rather than by the grammatical number of the subject Obviously the earlier Elizabethan freedom had not yet been reduced to formal grammatical regularity. The tug-of-war between notional and formal agreement underlies most of the agreement problems we deal with. There is one additional contributor to these problems. It is what Quirk et al. 1985 calls the principle of proximity (it is also called attraction and blind agreement)— the agreement of the verb with a noun or pronoun intervening between it and the subject. No doubt it likewise was in operation at an early time. Here is an instance written by Swift and cited by Strang 1970: • The common weight of these Halfpence are ... The verb are here matches Halfpence rather than weight; it appears in the sentence as printed in 1724. Strang tells us that in 1725 are was corrected to is. Quirk remarks that conflict between formal concord and attraction through proximity tends to increase with the distance between the noun head (true subject) and the verb, and that proximity agreement is more often found in unplanned discourse than in writing. Fries 1940 notes that gross violations of concord— use of a number-distinctive form that matches neither the formal nor the notional number of the subject—are found only in uneducated English. Sentences like • And them bass fiddles that's electrified, they're so loud, and the average man that plays 'em don't know how to turn 'em down —Birch Monroe, quoted in Bluegrass Unlimited, September 1982 that are typical of the speech of uneducated people, are seldom treated in books on usage and grammar, simply because everyone recognizes them as nonstandard. They will not receive much attention in this book either. In the articles immediately following, we have broken the large subject of agreement into several smaller sections, which we hope you will find easier to refer to than one long treatment would be. In addition, many specific problems that usage writers treat separately have been put at their own places. See, for instance, as well as; each; many a; none; one of those who; there is, there are; they, their, them. |
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