subjectverb

Subjectverb is a term used in linguistics to describe the grammatical relationship between a subject and its finite verb in a sentence. In languages that mark agreement, the verb changes form to reflect properties of the subject, most commonly person (first, second, third) and number (singular, plural). The term is often used as a shorthand for subject–verb agreement, the system by which the form of the verb corresponds to the subject.

In English and many other Indo-European languages, the present tense exhibits the clearest agreement pattern: the third person singular subject typically takes a verb form with an -s ending (she runs), while all other subjects use the base form (they run). Other tenses use inflected auxiliaries or different paradigms, and agreement may be affected by subject position, distance from the verb, or the use of collective nouns. Special constructions include questions and negations, where verb form may be governed by inversion or auxiliary selection, and with compound subjects joined by and, the verb generally agrees with a plural interpretation, though closer to the verb is the essential subject for agreement when the subject is linked by or/nor (e.g., neither the teacher nor the students are ready).

Across languages, subject–verb agreement ranges from robust systems with extensive gender and number concord to minimal or zero agreement, or agreement spanning more than one element (e.g., subject and object). In linguistics, analyses of subjectverb contribute to theories of syntax, morphology, and language variation, and they are central to natural language processing applications such as grammar checkers and parsers.