Grammatical agreement requires certain words to share features (number, person, gender, case). Subject-verb agreement is most common: singular subjects take singular verbs ("The dog barks"); plural subjects take plural verbs ("The dogs bark"). Pronoun agreement requires pronouns to match their antecedents in number and person ("The boy lost his keys", not "his key").
Identify the head noun and determine its number, then apply that number consistently to verbs and pronouns that relate to it. Pay special attention to collective nouns, indefinite pronouns, and compound subjects, which create agreement challenges.
Grammatical agreement — also called concord — is the mechanism by which related words in a sentence must match on certain features. You already know this from two specific domains: subject-verb agreement requires the verb's form to match the subject's number and person, and pronoun agreement requires a pronoun to mirror its antecedent's number, person, and gender. This topic asks you to see both as instances of one underlying principle: when two elements are syntactically linked, they must share the relevant grammatical features.
Think of agreement as a kind of contract between words. In "The dog barks," the subject "dog" is singular third person, and the verb "barks" is marked for exactly that — the -s ending is the verb's signature agreeing to the contract. In "She lost her keys," the pronoun "her" signals that its antecedent is singular and feminine. The pronoun isn't just standing in for a noun; it's carrying forward the noun's feature signature into a new part of the sentence. Agreement, in both cases, keeps the sentence internally consistent.
The tricky cases in English arise when the head noun is hard to identify. Intervening words can disguise number — "The box of chocolates is/are heavy" — because "chocolates" (plural) sits right next to the verb while the true subject "box" (singular) is further away. The agreement rule doesn't change; it's just harder to apply correctly. Similarly, collective nouns like "team" or "committee" are grammatically singular in American English when treated as a unified entity ("The team wins its games"), but plural when the members are acting individually ("The team are disagreeing among themselves"). The choice depends on conceptual focus, not surface form.
The comprehensive picture also includes features beyond number. Languages like French require gender agreement between adjectives and nouns. Latin required case agreement across noun phrases. English has simplified most of this, but the logic is identical: grammatically linked words share a feature bundle, and that sharing is enforced by inflectional form. Even in English, the remnants are visible — "this/that" versus "these/those" track number; "who/whom" track case; "his/her/their" track gender and number simultaneously. Understanding agreement as a unified system — not a pile of separate rules — lets you transfer reasoning to new cases, including edge cases with indefinite pronouns, relative clauses, and embedded subjects.