1.9.1 Grammar 2: agreement
Agreement is a grammatical term that really means making two or more grammatical elements match. In Spanish that can be making a verb match its subject, indicating plurality, or gender agreement. Let’s review the two you probably find rather easy before we move on to the one that is hard.
Verbal agreement.
When you conjugate a verb, you are making it agree with its subject. As you know, the subject pronouns in Spanish are:
| Singular | Plural | |
| First person | yo | nosotros/nosotras/nosotres |
| Second person informal | Tú
Vos (in parts of Latin America) |
vosotros/vosotras/vosotres (in most of Spain) |
| Third person or
Second person formal |
él/ella/elle
Usted |
ellos/ellas/elles
Ustedes (both formal and informal in Latin America) |
English also has subject verb agreement, although to a lesser degree than Spanish.
Plurality
Both English and Spanish mark nouns for plurality and both languages have multiple forms to indicate plurality. Take a look at this table, all the forms should look very familiar to you:
EnglishSingular |
Plural |
| cat | cats |
| apple | Apples (say it out loud to hear how it’s different from the ending of cats) |
| fish | fishes |
Spanish |
|
| El gato / la gata | Los gatos / Las gatas |
| La pared | Las paredes |
Finally, there are irregular forms in both Spanish and English. Here are some examples:
😣Mouse → Mice
🙁 Ox→ oxen
😡Goose→ Geese
But of course→
😡Moose→ Moose
Exceptions are also a thing in Spanish:
Caries es caries 😡😡😡
Activity
So far, so good. However, as you’ll review in this chapter, Spanish adds the additional wrinkle of gender agreement that English does not have.
