= Grammatical agreement
<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.<Agreement in the SIL Glossary of Linguistic Terms>[Definition and Examples]{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 (grammar)>'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.
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