Category Archives: Reference

“Agreement: Syntactic relation between words and phrases which are compatible, in a given construction, by virtue of inflections carried by at least one of them. E.g. these and carrots are compatible in the construction of these carrots, because both are inflected as a plural. Likewise, in the Italian sentence Maria e Luisa sono arrivate ‘Mary and Louise have arrived,’ sono (lit. ‘be-3pl’) agrees in respect of plural number with arrivate (‘arrived-FEM.PL’) and both, or sono arrivate as a whole, agree with a subject, Maria e Luisa, which refers to more than one woman.

Also called concord. Distinctions are drawn between grammatical agreement and notional agreement; also between agreement and some similar relations of compatibility, such as the government of cases by prepositions. But this last distinction is often at best imprecise.”

Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H., ed. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

“Apposition: A syntactic relation in which an element is juxtaposed to another element of the same kind. Especially between noun phrases that do not have distinct referents: e.g. Lucienne is in apposition to my wife in Do you know my wife Lucienne? Thence of other cases where elements are seen as parallel but do not have distinct roles in a larger construction: e.g. Smith is said to be apposed to Captain in Do you know Captain Smith?”

Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H., ed. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.