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2. Agreement
(also called concord).(1) The correspondence between the grammatical form ofa noun (or the noun’s member
ship in a specific syntacticclass) and the grammatical form ofa word,generallyan adjective or verb, connected
with the noun in a sentence. Agreement in agrammatical categorymeans thata change in a noun’s grammatic
al sense causes (although onlyin some cases) a change in the wordsconnected with the noun. In Russian, agr
eement exists according to case (seryi volk,“gray wolf”-serogo volka,“of the gray wolf”), number(seryi volk-
serye volki,“gray wolves”;volk voet, “the wolfhowls”-vo/A:¡ voiut, “the wolves howl”),and gender (seryi volk-
seraia sobaka,“graydog” [feminine]; volk vyl,“the wolf hovfed”-sobaka vyla,“the dog howled”).
Grammatical descriptions oflanguages generallyrepresentagreement as a correspondence between the gram
matical meanings (or betweensuch elements as case,number,and gender) ofa noun and of the words connec
ted with the noun.However, agreement maybe defined inother ways.For example,in standard Estonian gram
mar,when a noun is in the comitative case the modifying adjective mustbe in thegenitive case.
Agreement is a means ofexpressing a syntactic bond, which may be direct (seryi volk) or indirect(dom,v kotor
om my zhivem,“the house inwhich we live”; sestra ushla,skazavshis’bol’noi,“sister left,saying she was ill”).A
greement is well developed in inflected languages and,toa lesser extent, in agglutinative languages.Itis abse
nt in amorphous languages.
(2) A direct syntactic bond between the words in a phrase, expressed bymeans ofagreement in the first meani
ng of the term, generallyincombination with work order and intonation. An example is the bond within the word
group seryi volk.
A. A. ZALIZNIAK