Concordantia

Concordantia is a term rooted in Latin, meaning agreement or harmony. In linguistic and philological contexts it denotes the principle of concord, the requirement that certain words within a phrase or sentence agree with others in features such as gender, number, and case, or in person and number for verbs. The concept is central to the study of morphosyntax, and it governs how words cohere in a sentence.

In Latin grammar, concordantia describes two main kinds of agreement: nominal concord, where adjectives and determiners match the noun in gender, number, and case; and verbal concord, where the verb agrees with the subject in person and number. The mechanism ensures syntactic coherence, and deviations are typically considered errors in classical prose, though poets and spoken varieties may permit stylistic or pragmatic flexibility.

In textual scholarship, concordantia also refers to a concordance: an index or database that lists all occurrences of a word or lemma within a text or corpus, often with brief contexts. Such tools aid studies of word usage, sense, and textual variation, and are commonly used for Latin, biblical, and literary works.

In modern linguistics, the term is used to discuss cross-linguistic agreement phenomena, including how languages mark features like gender, number, and person on nouns, adjectives, determiners, pronouns, and verbs. The word thus covers both grammatical agreement in language and reference works that catalog word occurrences.

Etymologically, concordantia derives from Latin concordare, “to be in agreement.”