Grammatical agreement is the transmission of morphological characteristics of grammatical inflection from one main word to another (s). In general, concordance is the act or effect of harmonizing inflections of words in a sentence; in this context, it can be understood as “refers correctly”. [ 1 ] When verbal, agreement refers to the relationship between verb and orational subject as to their inflections in number and person ; the nominal applies to variations of gender and number of the relationship between the nominal syntactic nucleus and other class wordsvariables, called the nominal phrase . [ 2 ] [ 3 ] The agreement can also be made according to the idea contained in the word, thus making use of the silepse – figure of speech that establishes the ideological agreement between words. [ 3 ] In the phrase “Everyone believes in the future” the stylistic predominates (the speaker perceives himself and declares himself part of the subject “all”) over the grammatical logic (which would indicate the conjugated verb in the third person of the plural, “believe” , not in the first person plural, “we believe”). [ 3 ]
Nominal concordance consists of adapting one name to another, harmonizing in its inflections with the words on which they depend. In the grammar of the Portuguese language , the nominal agreement is given by the relationship between a noun , pronoun or even noun numeral and the other words that link to them to characterize them – be they articles , adjectives , adjectives pronouns and adjectival numerals. In general, it can be said that article, adjective, pronoun and numeral must agree on gender (male / female) and number(singular / plural) with the noun to which it refers. Adjectives in front of nouns agree with the closest, but if you exercise the function of predicative you can agree in two ways: with the closest or go to the plural . In the case that the adjective comes after several nouns, the agreement already changes, because if the nouns are of the same gender there are two possibilities: go to the plural or assume the gender of the noun. [ citation needed ]
Verbal agreement is the inflection of the verb in accordance with the number and person of the subject of the sentence. [ 4 ] The example sentences “João does his homework” and “Students do his homework” bring the verbs in the same number-personal inflection of their orational subjects – respectively, in the third person singular (subject “João “and verb” faz “) and in the third person plural (subject” students “and verb” faz “).
