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Compound subject

Index Compound subject

A compound subject is two or more individual noun phrases coordinated to form a single, longer noun phrase. Compound subjects cause many difficulties in the proper usage of grammatical agreement between the subject and other entities (verbs, pronouns, etc.). In reality, these issues are not specific to compound subjects as such, coming up equally as well with compound noun phrases of all sorts, but the problems are most acute with compound subjects because of the large number of types of agreement occurring with such subjects. As shown in the examples, for English compound subjects joined by and, the agreement rules are generally unambiguous, but sometimes tricky. For example, the compound subject you and I is treated equivalently to we, taking appropriate pronominal agreement ("our car", not "your car", "their car", etc.). In languages with more extensive subject-verb agreement (e.g. Spanish or Arabic), the verb agreement is clearly revealed as also being first-person plural. For the subjects joined by or, however, the rules are often ill-defined, especially when two elements that differ in grammatical gender or grammatical number are coordinate. (The tendency, in such cases, is to rewrite the sentences to avoid the conjunction: e.g. "Sylvia and I each have our own car, and one of us is planning to sell their car". Note that this still has a compound subject using and as the conjunction, and uses "semi-informal" "generic their" to get around the "his or her" problem. This could be avoided with a further rewrite: "Either Sylvia will sell her car, or I will sell mine.". [1]

22 relations: Agreement (linguistics), Arabic, Classical Arabic, Coordination (linguistics), Dual (grammatical number), English language, English personal pronouns, French language, German language, Grammatical case, Grammatical gender, Grammatical number, Irish language, Latin, Modern Standard Arabic, Noun phrase, Object (grammar), Spanish language, Subject (grammar), Subject pronoun, Varieties of Arabic, Verb.

Agreement (linguistics)

Agreement or concord (abbreviated) happens when a word changes form depending on the other words to which it relates.

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Arabic

Arabic (العَرَبِيَّة) or (عَرَبِيّ) or) is a Central Semitic language that first emerged in Iron Age northwestern Arabia and is now the lingua franca of the Arab world. It is named after the Arabs, a term initially used to describe peoples living from Mesopotamia in the east to the Anti-Lebanon mountains in the west, in northwestern Arabia, and in the Sinai peninsula. Arabic is classified as a macrolanguage comprising 30 modern varieties, including its standard form, Modern Standard Arabic, which is derived from Classical Arabic. As the modern written language, Modern Standard Arabic is widely taught in schools and universities, and is used to varying degrees in workplaces, government, and the media. The two formal varieties are grouped together as Literary Arabic (fuṣḥā), which is the official language of 26 states and the liturgical language of Islam. Modern Standard Arabic largely follows the grammatical standards of Classical Arabic and uses much of the same vocabulary. However, it has discarded some grammatical constructions and vocabulary that no longer have any counterpart in the spoken varieties, and has adopted certain new constructions and vocabulary from the spoken varieties. Much of the new vocabulary is used to denote concepts that have arisen in the post-classical era, especially in modern times. During the Middle Ages, Literary Arabic was a major vehicle of culture in Europe, especially in science, mathematics and philosophy. As a result, many European languages have also borrowed many words from it. Arabic influence, mainly in vocabulary, is seen in European languages, mainly Spanish and to a lesser extent Portuguese, Valencian and Catalan, owing to both the proximity of Christian European and Muslim Arab civilizations and 800 years of Arabic culture and language in the Iberian Peninsula, referred to in Arabic as al-Andalus. Sicilian has about 500 Arabic words as result of Sicily being progressively conquered by Arabs from North Africa, from the mid 9th to mid 10th centuries. Many of these words relate to agriculture and related activities (Hull and Ruffino). Balkan languages, including Greek and Bulgarian, have also acquired a significant number of Arabic words through contact with Ottoman Turkish. Arabic has influenced many languages around the globe throughout its history. Some of the most influenced languages are Persian, Turkish, Spanish, Urdu, Kashmiri, Kurdish, Bosnian, Kazakh, Bengali, Hindi, Malay, Maldivian, Indonesian, Pashto, Punjabi, Tagalog, Sindhi, and Hausa, and some languages in parts of Africa. Conversely, Arabic has borrowed words from other languages, including Greek and Persian in medieval times, and contemporary European languages such as English and French in modern times. Classical Arabic is the liturgical language of 1.8 billion Muslims and Modern Standard Arabic is one of six official languages of the United Nations. All varieties of Arabic combined are spoken by perhaps as many as 422 million speakers (native and non-native) in the Arab world, making it the fifth most spoken language in the world. Arabic is written with the Arabic alphabet, which is an abjad script and is written from right to left, although the spoken varieties are sometimes written in ASCII Latin from left to right with no standardized orthography.

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Classical Arabic

Classical Arabic is the form of the Arabic language used in Umayyad and Abbasid literary texts from the 7th century AD to the 9th century AD.

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Coordination (linguistics)

In linguistics, coordination is a frequently occurring complex syntactic structure that links together two or more elements, known as conjuncts or conjoins.

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Dual (grammatical number)

Dual (abbreviated) is a grammatical number that some languages use in addition to singular and plural.

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English language

English is a West Germanic language that was first spoken in early medieval England and is now a global lingua franca.

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English personal pronouns

The personal pronouns in English take various forms according to number, person, case and natural gender.

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French language

French (le français or la langue française) is a Romance language of the Indo-European family.

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German language

German (Deutsch) is a West Germanic language that is mainly spoken in Central Europe.

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Grammatical case

Case is a special grammatical category of a noun, pronoun, adjective, participle or numeral whose value reflects the grammatical function performed by that word in a phrase, clause or sentence.

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Grammatical gender

In linguistics, grammatical gender is a specific form of noun class system in which the division of noun classes forms an agreement system with another aspect of the language, such as adjectives, articles, pronouns, or verbs.

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Grammatical number

In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one", "two", or "three or more").

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Irish language

The Irish language (Gaeilge), also referred to as the Gaelic or the Irish Gaelic language, is a Goidelic language (Gaelic) of the Indo-European language family originating in Ireland and historically spoken by the Irish people.

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Latin

Latin (Latin: lingua latīna) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages.

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Modern Standard Arabic

Modern Standard Arabic (MSA; اللغة العربية الفصحى 'the most eloquent Arabic language'), Standard Arabic, or Literary Arabic is the standardized and literary variety of Arabic used in writing and in most formal speech throughout the Arab world to facilitate communication.

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Noun phrase

A noun phrase or nominal phrase (abbreviated NP) is a phrase which has a noun (or indefinite pronoun) as its head, or which performs the same grammatical function as such a phrase.

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Object (grammar)

Traditional grammar defines the object in a sentence as the entity that is acted upon by the subject.

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Spanish language

Spanish or Castilian, is a Western Romance language that originated in the Castile region of Spain and today has hundreds of millions of native speakers in Latin America and Spain.

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Subject (grammar)

The subject in a simple English sentence such as John runs, John is a teacher, or John was hit by a car is the person or thing about whom the statement is made, in this case 'John'.

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Subject pronoun

In linguistics, a subject pronoun is a personal pronoun that is used as the subject of a verb.

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Varieties of Arabic

There are many varieties of Arabic (dialects or otherwise) in existence.

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Verb

A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word (part of speech) that in syntax conveys an action (bring, read, walk, run, learn), an occurrence (happen, become), or a state of being (be, exist, stand).

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References

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_subject

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