Agreement – Number, Person, Case Overview

Let's start by first reviewing the three grammatical features that affect the correct match between parts of sentences. Next, we will learn about specific subject-verb agreement rules in more detail to understand how to correctly match them in sentences.

Sometimes, making subjects and their verbs or nouns and their antecedents agree in English can seem difficult, so this review will provide a basic understanding of how this agreement happens.

Agreement in speech and in writing refers to the proper grammatical match between words and phrases. Parts of sentences must agree, or match with other parts, in number, person, and case.

Number: One or many?

All parts must match in singular or plural forms. As we learned in ESL001, number applies to nouns and pronouns to show when there is more than one.

To recognize plural forms of nouns, we look for -s, -es, or -ies endings for regular nouns. However, this doesn't indicate the plural form of irregular nouns or collective nouns. Pronouns also have different forms for plural. And, of course, main or lexical verbs also have grammatical number, as we learned in more detail in ESL002.

Examples	Singular (one)	Plural (many)
noun	cat foot police	cats feet police
pronoun	I him its	we them they
verbs	cooks is sleeping has worked	cook are sleeping have worked

Let's see some explanations and examples of grammatical number as it applies to nouns and pronouns:

Person: Who is there?

All parts must match in first-person (I), second-person (you), or third-person (he, she, it, they) forms. When referring to the participant or participants to an event, the grammatical category of person allows us to distinguish between a speaker, those directly addressed, and others.

Let's see some explanations and examples of grammatical person as it applies to pronouns:

Case: What's function?

For the grammatical concept of case, we're looking at how this specifically applies to pronouns. In a sentence, all parts must match in subjective (I, you, he, she, it, they, we), objective (me, her, him, them, us), or possessive (my, mine, your, yours, his, her, hers, their, theirs, our, ours) forms.

A subjective pronoun is a pronoun that is the subject of the sentence: "who" or "what" the sentence is about. It is also the doer of the action if an action verb is used in the sentence.
An objective pronoun is a pronoun that is the object of the verb: "who" or "what" was acted upon.
A possessive pronoun is a pronoun that shows possession or ownership.

Let's see some explanations and examples of grammatical case as it applies to pronouns:

Now that we have reviewed grammatical number, person, and case, let's look at subject-verb agreement in more detail to see how they can always be matched in our sentences.

Content adapted from:

Jen Booth, Emily Cramer, and Amanda Quibell, https://ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/gccomm/chapter/subject-verb-agreement/
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License.