Agreement and case
We saw earlier that the criteria for identifying subjects rest in part upon the notion of agreement. The term ‘agreement’ (known as concord in traditional grammar) describes the morphological marking of a grammatical unit to signal a particular grammatical relationship with another unit. Agreement involves grammatical features like person, number and gender and may interact with case. We will illustrate these grammatical features here with the personal pro nouns, since they are the only nominal category in English to show a reason ably full range of distinct morphological forms. Person is the grammatical feature that distinguishes speaker (first person), hearer (second person) and third party (third person). Compare I, you and she. This feature participates in subject–verb agreement in English, but only in the present tense and only in the singular third person form. Consider the examples in (34).
As these examples illustrate, it is only when the subject is a third person singular noun phrase (e.g. he, she or Lily) that the verb form changes. Person is a deictic category. As we saw in Chapter 7, deictic categories rely upon context in order to be fully interpreted. The aspects of context that are particularly relevant to deixis are space and time, and the speaker’s location in space and time is central to how the deictic system works. For example, the use of open-class deictic expressions like the verbs bring and take or come and go are interpreted relative to the positions of speaker and hearer. Bring and come encode motion towards the speaker or hearer, while take and go encode motion away from the speaker or hearer’s position at the moment of speaking. The adverbs here and there encode proximity to or distance from the speaker respectively, and the adverbs now and then are interpreted relative to the moment of speaking. The grammatical feature person is a deictic category because the meaning of personal pronouns shifts continually during conversational exchange, and you have to know who is speaking to know who these expressions refer to. Recall example (35), which we first saw in Chapter 7 (Levinson 1983: 55). Imagine you are on a desert island and you find this message in a bottle washed up on the beach.
This example illustrates the dependence of deictic expressions on contextual information. Without knowing the person who wrote the message, where the note was written or the time at which it was written, you cannot fully interpret me, here, a week from now, or a stick about this big. The other major grammatical category that is deictic in nature is tense, which is interpreted relative to the moment of speaking.
Returning to agreement, number is the grammatical feature that distinguishes singular from plural. Compare I and we, which are both first person pronouns. Some languages have a more complex system; for example, Arabic distinguishes singular, dual and plural (three or more). Gender is the grammatical feature that distinguishes noun classes (commonly, ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’). Grammatical gender does not necessarily correlate with the biological sex of the referent. Strictly speaking, English does not have grammatical gender because common nouns are not subdivided into gender categories. Despite this, the pronouns he/him/his and she/her/hers are described as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’. The fact that English lacks a system of grammatical gender explains why there is no gender agreement in English between nouns and other elements in the noun phrase. Compare the English and French phrases in examples (36) and (37). While the determiner and the adjective remain the same for boy and girl in English, these categories show distinct gender forms in French, a language with grammatical gender. In other words, the determiner and the adjective, which are dependents of the noun, agree with the noun in French.
As these examples show, proper nouns and common nouns in English do not inflect for case: whether these occur as subject or object, their morphological form remains unchanged. In contrast, (most of) the English personal pronouns do show distinct case forms. The feminine singular form is she in subject position (nominative) and her in object position (accusative). The masculine sin gular form is he in subject position (nominative) and him in object position (accusative). Table 14.4 illustrates how these grammatical features interact within the English personal pronoun system.
