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Grammatical agreement is a formal relationship in which the form of one linguistic element requires a corresponding form of another. Grammatical number can participate in this relationship, but the features expressed and the elements involved vary among languages. Agreement is a constraint on connected grammatical elements, rather than a requirement that adjacent words merely resemble each other.^[ref]

Compare The key to the cabinets is missing with The keys to the cabinet are missing. In these English examples, the verb form tracks the number of the subject's head noun, not the closest noun. An explicit model can assign Number=Sing to key and require the corresponding agreement form is. Changing the embedded noun cabinet to cabinets leaves that requirement intact. Such contrasts provide testable predictions for a proposed syntax and show why a rule based only on the nearest preceding word fails.

Grammatical number is a grammatical category expressing count-related distinctions, commonly singular and plural, through word forms or grammatical agreement. It is a feature of a linguistic expression, not simply the numerical size of the thing being described. Its categories do not always correspond directly to the count of real-world referents.^[ref]

The contrast boat/boats marks singular versus plural on a noun. Yet These scissors are blunt can describe one tool while using plural forms and plural grammatical agreement. Conversely, a committee can denote several people through a singular noun. An annotation should therefore record the grammatical feature separately from an investigator's count of objects. Some languages distinguish a dual category for exactly two, showing that the inventory of number categories is itself an empirical question.^[ref]

Inflection expresses grammatical distinctions through the forms of a lexeme, without normally creating a new lexical item. Grammatical number, grammatical tense and grammatical agreement can be expressed inflectionally, depending on the language. The distinctions and their overt expression must be kept separate: a grammatical meaning can instead be expressed by a separate word.^[ref]

In one boat and two boats, the ending marks a number contrast while both forms belong to the same lexeme. The pair walk and walked similarly contrasts grammatical forms of a verb. By comparison, deriving kindness from kind creates a new lexical item through derivational morphology. A computational description can store the base together with grammatical features, then predict its surface form. Irregular forms show why that prediction cannot always be reduced to concatenating one universal ending.

Kathleen M. Eberhard studies psycholinguistics, especially the production of language and coordination during conversation. Her Notre Dame profile identifies research on subject-verb grammatical agreement, including a theoretical account and computational model published in 2005. It also documents her contribution to the visual world paradigm, which times listeners' fixations to objects during spoken comprehension.^[ref]

These questions make grammar experimentally observable. For an illustrative production task, compare a singular head followed by a singular modifier with the same head followed by a plural modifier, while holding the intended grammatical agreement fixed. Errors and response timing can help discriminate accounts of how speakers build the utterance. This is a schematic experimental contrast, not a numerical result attributed to her work. Her institutional research statement also connects language production to bilingualism and the coordination of understanding in dialogue.

A subject is a grammatical relation identified through language-specific structural tests, such as word order and grammatical agreement. It often corresponds to the actor in a simple active clause, but that semantic association is not its definition. A noun phrase can be a subject without describing an intentional action.^[ref]

Compare A gust broke the branch and The branch was broken by a gust. The first has a gust as its subject; in the passive voice version, the branch has that relation. The participants' involvement in the event has not simply exchanged places. Separating grammatical relations from thematic roles explains the contrast.

In Universal Dependencies, a nominal passive subject can receive nsubj:pass, explicitly preserving its subject status. Such a representation supports a testable structural account and prevents a procedure from assigning “subject” solely to whichever expression appears to name a doer.

A syntactic head is the element treated as central to a construction under a specified structural analysis. It can determine grammatical properties or which other elements may occur. Headedness therefore concerns relationships within a construction, beyond which word seems most informative in the conversation.^[ref]

In a conventional noun-headed analysis of the small boxes, boxes heads the noun phrase. The head's plural grammatical number helps explain the grammatical agreement in The small boxes are ready. Changing small to heavy changes the description without changing that number requirement.

In a dependency representation, a head also provides the attachment point for syntactic dependencies. A reproducible analysis states its conventions: different grammatical frameworks can choose different heads for some constructions. The success of a representation depends on the patterns it explains and predicts, not solely on whether its links form a mechanically valid rooted tree.

A verb is a part of speech that commonly organizes a clause, specifying relationships among its participants and contributing an event or state description. Forms of a verb may express grammatical tense, grammatical aspect or grammatical agreement, though the mechanisms differ across languages.^[ref]

Compare Rin sleeps with Rin opens the box. The second construction contains an object in addition to its subject; knowing a verb includes knowing how it combines with other expressions. Calling verbs “action words” misses examples such as know, which describes a state.

An annotation scheme must also define its boundaries. Universal Dependencies assigns main verbs the label VERB while distinguishing auxiliary uses with AUX. Thus a traditional grammatical description and a particular computational tag inventory need not draw every boundary identically. Stating the scheme makes category counts in a text corpus interpretable.