Definition

1. Noun:
   • Grammatical concord in case: "case agreement" refers to the grammatical requirement that words within the same syntactic construction must match in their grammatical case. This is a feature of languages with case systems, ensuring syntactic correctness.

Usage

• "Case agreement" is a technical term used in linguistics and grammar to describe a specific type of syntactic relationship. It is primarily used when analyzing or learning languages with rich inflectional case systems, such as Latin, German, Russian, or Ancient Greek.

Examples

• Noun:
  • In the Latin phrase "puella bona" (good girl), the adjective "bona" shows case agreement with the noun "puella," both being in the nominative case.
  • A common error for learners of German is incorrect case agreement between articles and nouns, such as using "der" (nominative) instead of "den" (accusative) for a masculine direct object.

Advanced Usage

• Syntactic Feature: In formal linguistic theory, "case agreement" is analyzed as a syntactic feature that must be checked and valued during the derivation of a sentence structure.
• Morphosyntactic Alignment: The study of "case agreement" patterns contributes to understanding a language's morphosyntactic alignment (e.g., nominative-accusative vs. ergative-absolutive).

Variants and Related Words

• Agreement (Noun): A broader term encompassing case agreement, number agreement, gender agreement, and person agreement.
• Concord (Noun): Often used synonymously with "agreement" in grammatical contexts.
• Government (Noun): A related but distinct grammatical phenomenon where one word dictates the case of another (e.g., a preposition governs a specific case), whereas agreement involves matching features.

Synonyms

• Case concord: A less common but precise synonym.
• Grammatical agreement in case: A descriptive synonym.

Related Phrases

• Feature agreement: A more general phrase in syntax that includes case, number, gender, and person.
• Syntactic agreement: Highlights that the agreement is a rule of sentence structure.

Notes

• "Case agreement" is not an idiom or a phrasal verb. It is a fixed, technical noun phrase.
• This concept is not typically relevant for isolating languages like English, which has a very limited case system (primarily visible in pronouns: ). English exhibits strong agreement in number and person (e.g., vs. ), but not in the robust, morphological case sense denoted by "case agreement."

Noun

1. agreement in grammatical case between words in the same construction