case agreement

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A student writes a sentence on the chalkboard to demonstrate case agreement.

Definition

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

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."

A student writes a sentence on the chalkboard to demonstrate case agreement.

Noun