English Grammar for the Utterly Confused - Laurie Rozakis 2003
Like Peas in a Pod
Chapter 5 Agreement: Matching Sentence Parts
Part 2 Usage and Abusage
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Agreement means that sentence parts match. Subjects must agree with verbs, and pronouns must agree with antecedents. If they don’t, your sentences will sound awkward and may confuse your listeners and readers.
Like Peas in a Pod
Romeo and Juliet
Spaghetti and meatballs
Peanut butter and jelly
The birds and the bees
Some things just seem to go together well. We carry this concept over into grammar by matching all sentence parts. This matching of sentence elements is called agreement. It helps you create smooth and logical sentences.
The basic rule of sentence agreement is simple: A subject must agree with its verb in number. Number means singular or plural.
• A singular subject names one person, place, thing, or idea.
• A plural subject names more than one person, place, thing, or idea.
Here are some examples:
1. Singular and plural nouns
In English, the plurals of most nouns are formed by adding -s or -es to the singular form.
For example: bike → bikes; race → races; inch → inches. Some nouns have irregular plurals, such as mouse → mice; woman → women, goose → geese. You can find the plural forms of irregular nouns in a dictionary.
2. Singular and plural pronouns
Pronouns have singular and plural forms, too. Study the following chart.
3. Singular and plural verbs
As with nouns and pronouns, verbs show singular and plural forms. There are two areas in which you may have difficulty identifying singular and plural forms of nouns: the basic present tense and tenses using the helping verb to be.
As you study the following chart, notice that the form of the verb changes only in the third-person singular column, the middle column. Find the -s or -es added to the verb. That’s the tricky part:
• Singular verbs end in -s or -es.
• Plural nouns end in -s or -es.
Here are some examples:
As you can see from this chart, subject-verb agreement is most difficult to determine in the present tense.
4. Singular and plural forms of be
The form of the helping verb be may also help you determine whether a verb is singular or plural. The following chart shows the forms of be that are different from singular to plural.
Be Used as a Helping Verb
