agreementmarked

Agreementmarked is a term used in linguistics to describe a property of words that carry markers reflecting grammatical features of other words in the same clause. These markers, which can be affixes, clitics, particles, or separate words, encode information such as person, number, gender, or case. The phenomenon is widespread across language families and supports concord between related elements within noun phrases and across the clause.

Distribution varies widely. In English, agreement is mainly seen on the verb for third-person singular subjects (he walks) while adjectives generally do not inflect for number. In Spanish, nouns and adjectives agree in gender and number, and verbs agree with the subject in person and number. In many Bantu languages, agreement is extensive, with concord markers on verbs and adjectives that reflect noun class and other features, sometimes spreading across the entire predicate.

Morphology and syntax: markers can be inflectional affixes, clitics, or independent words. Agreementmarked contributes to the syntactic structure by signaling dependency relations and helping listeners determine who agrees with whom. It interacts with different typological patterns, such as head-marking versus dependent-marking systems. In head-marking languages, verbs may carry markers that reference subjects or objects, while in dependent-marking languages, nouns or adjectives bear the markers.

Relation to theory: some frameworks treat concord or agreement as a subtype of cross-phrase marking, while others view it as feature matching within a syntactic chain. Across languages, the number of features marked, the elements that bear indicators, and how agreement interacts with word order are central concerns in morphosyntax and typology.

See also: concord, noun class, subject-verb agreement.