In addition to the terms used for the parts of speech, traditional grammatical analysis has also given us a number of other categories, including “number,” “person,” “tense,” “voice” and “gender.” These categories can be discussed in isolation, but their role in describing language structure becomes clearer when we consider them in terms of agreement. For example, we say that the verb loves “agrees with” the noun Cathy in the sentence Cathy loves her dog.

This agreement is partially based on the category of number, that is, whether the noun is singular or plural. It is also based on the category of person, which covers the distinctions of first person (involving the speaker), second person (involving the hearer) and third person (involving any others). The different forms of English pronouns can be described in terms of person and number. We use I for first person singular, you for second person singular, and he, she , it (or Cathy) for third person singular. So, in the sentence Cathy loves her dog, we have a noun Cathy, which is third person singular, and we use the verb loves (not love) to “agree with” the noun.

In addition, the form of the verb must be described in terms of another category called tense. In this case, the verb loves is in the present tense, which is different from Grammar 83 the past tense (loved). The sentence is also in the active voice, describing what Cathy does (i.e. she performs the action of the verb). An alternative would be the passive voice, which can be used to describe what happens to Cathy (i.e. she doesn’t perform the action), as in Cathy is loved by her dog or just Cathy is loved.

Our final category is gender, which helps us describe the agreement between Cathy and her in our example sentence. In English, we have to describe this relationship in terms of natural gender, mainly derived from a biological distinction between male and female. The agreement between Cathy and her is based on a distinction made in English between reference to female entities (she, her), male entities (he, his) and things or creatures, when the sex is unknown or irrelevant (it, its).