MASTERING THE RULES OF CONCORD IN FEW MINUTES (1)
by Ajibade Taofeek
Concord simply means “agreement” or “harmony”. In relation to languages, it refers to the agreement that must exist between the subject of a sentence and the verb before a sentence can be said to be grammatically correct. We can say concord in language is Subject-Verb Agreement. The knowledge of this agreement save you from grammatical errors in everyday situation and enable you to pass your English examinations with flying colours.
For adequate understanding of the rules of concord in English, you must understand simple terms like subject, verb and number.
Subject refers to the noun, noun phrase or pronounce that occurs at the beginning of the sentence which usually comes before the verb. It is usually the performer of the action or what is being talked about e.g
The beautiful girl sleeps on the floor.
A very tall building is being constructed.
Sade will go to the market tomorrow.
Tola’s husband or sister betrayed her.
As you can see, all the underlined words are subjects. They can exist as a word or phrase or even a clause. Also, they all come before their verbs.
The verbs are the italicized words. They can exist as just one word or two, three or more words. They all come after their subjects.
Anytime you number is being mentioned in English grammatical analysis, know that the discussion is based on singular and plural. There are numbers in the singular and plural in nouns and verbs, as shown below:
- a) The boy goes to school every day.
- b) The boys go to school every day
You can see that the boy did not take‘s’ in (a) because it is singular but takes the same in (b) because it is plural. The verb “go” takes‘s’ in (a) because it is plural but did not take same in (b). Most students don’t understand
In a) above, the number of the subject “The man” is singular because there is only one person involved. In b) the number of the subject “The man and the woman” is plural because there are two persons involved.
Number: The number of verb is quite different from that of noun. The key to understanding concord is to know the distinction between the number of verb and noun. Let’s explain this, shall we? When‘s’ is added to a noun, it becomes plural but when‘s’ is added to a verb, it becomes singular. How?
We know verbs like “go”, “come”, “keep”, “fill” etc. All these are lexical verbs and they are plural because they do not take‘s’. “goes”, “comes”, “keeps”, “fills” are their singular counterparts, the opposite of what we have in nouns with regard to singularity and plurality. See more examples for nouns:
Singular Plural
Table Tables
Shoe Shoes
Box Boxes
House Houses
And see the examples for verbs:
Plural Singular
Buy buys
Kill kills
Remove removes
Sit sits
Do you now understand that when you see‘s’ at the end of a noun, it’s plural but when it is attached to the end of a verb is singular? In the same vein, the absence of ‘s’ at the end of a noun is singular but plural if such word is a verb.
When you understand these bases, learning the rules of concord becomes very easy. Try to master this and await subsequent classes.
