earticle

영어

The purpose of this paper is to describe and explain the various aspects of the agreement in English. In this paper we are concerned with the following topics; (1)What is agreement? (2)The earlier works on agreement. (3)The reality of agreement. `Agreement` usually means that an element X of a syntactic structure agree or concords with the other element Y in number, person, and gender, sometimes in case. But how to agree with each other is often not agreed between the grammarians such as traditionalists and generativists. While the traditional grammar discusses that the subject agree with the predicate in number, person and gender without any representation of the process, the classical generative grammar maintains that the complex features (of number, person and gender) of the subject noun are copied into the predicate verb by the operation of the agreement transformation, and on the other hand, the agreement is accomplished through the feature checking in the Minimalist Program. Without regard to the controversies of the agreement, a careful examination shows that the agreement phenomenon is directly related with the cognitive knowledge and the socio-cultural patterns of expression concerning number, gender, person, case, etc.. The agreement is a structural notion since it is realized in the construction such as a noun phrase, a clause or a sentence. In virtue of the relevant data analyses we have come to the following propositions: (1) The agreement appears with the two different types; one is the syntactic agreement and the other the semantic. (2) The syntactic and the semantic agreement can be subdivided into the overt and covert agreement respectively. (3) The overt syntactic agreement is always realized with the subject noun annexed with the plural marker -s while the covert agreement with the zero morpheme -0. (4) The overt semantic agreement is the case that the subject noun has a premodifier phrase or a quantifier phrase meaning more than one like all..., two pieces of etc., while in the covert semantic agreement the subject noun carries a zero morpheme but the membership of the noun represents more than one. (5) The agreement is a syntactic(phonological, morphological, and semantical) process of harmonization between the immediate participants of a construction. (6) The agreement in number, person, and gender seems to be realized not only between the subject and the predicate verb but also between the subject-complement and the object-complement. (7) The immediate constituents are the constructional mates which are inherently to agree with each other in syntax, phonology, and semantics. Accordingly the agreement in number, person and gender etc. is just a syntactic agreement(harmonization) between the constructional mates.