XXVIII. The notion of syntactic relations. Their main types

Syntactical relations are the relations showing interdependence of the elements of both phrases and sentences. These fall under two main heads: (1) agreement or concord, (2) government.

Agreement

By agreement we mean a method of expressing a syntactical relationship, which consists in making the subordinate word take a form similar to that of the word to which it is subordinate. In Modern English this can refer only to the category of number: a subordinate word agrees in number with its head word if it has different, number forms at all. In some other languages, such as Russian, there is also agreement in case and gender. This is practically found in two words only, the pronouns this and that, which agree in number with their head word.

On the sentence level there is agreement of the verb with the noun or pronoun denoting the subject of the action (a child plays, children play). ( agreement of the predicate with the subject).