Subject-verb agreement | Syntax | Khan Academy

Hello Grim marians! Today we're going to talk about subject-verb agreement. What this is, is the idea that you want your subject and your verb to get along in a sentence. What agreement is in grammar is the art of making sure that sentence parts connect with one another in the right way. It's making sure you know that a square peg goes in a square hole, right? Not a square peg in a round hole, or a square peg in a triangular hole.

You want to make sure that the way you render your subject fits with the way you've rendered your verb. So what do I mean by that? Let's take the sentence: "The dog barks." We have this subject, "the dog," and it is singular; there's one of it. The way this verb is conjugated, the way we've assembled or figured out how the verb is going to be, is also a singular conjugate. So we say, "the dog barks" and not "the dog bark."

Right? This is not standard American English. This does not work; this is the plural form. You can say, "the dogs bark," right, because there's more than one dog here. This is their verb; this is the plural form. I know it's kind of strange that the third person singular form of a verb ends in "s." Like, if English made sense, if I ran the zoo, I would want it to work like this: "the dogs barks," right? Because there's an "s," there's multiple.

Unfortunately, for many weird reasons and the history of English, it didn't work out that way. A third person singular verb usually ends in an "s," right? So I talk—that's first person. Third person is "she talks." We eat—that's plural first person. "They eat?" See, no "s." It's only this weird third person singular here that's got that "s" on the end.

So if you're trying to figure out how to make something agree, if you're unsure as you're writing, looking at a sentence like "the dogs bark", you can't figure out if it's supposed to be "the dog's bark" or "the dog barks" or "the dogs barks," ask yourself first: What is the subject of the sentence?

So first, find the subject, and then ask yourself: Is it singular or plural? Is it S or P? Is it salt or is it pepper? If you can remember that, then just remember that singular "s" usually results in another "s." So if it's "the dog," and that's singular, then you're going to want to put that "s" over here.

If the subject isn't a noun but a pronoun, same question: Is it singular or plural? "I" is singular; there's only one of me. "We" is plural; there's many of us. And if it's singular third person, like "she," "he," or "it," end it in an "s."

Another thing to remember is that most what we call indefinite pronouns are third person singular. So if you wanted to ask whether or not anyone knows the way to San Jose as a question, but you're not sure whether it would be "Does anyone know the way to San Jose?" or "Do anyone know the way to San Jose?" Well, the word "anyone" is third person singular. Although "do" is an irregular verb, we still kind of hold to the idea that a third person singular verb ends in an "s."

So it's a "z" sound written as an "s." We would say "does," so "Does anyone know?" as opposed to, you know, if it were in the plural, "Do we know?" Right? So "does" is singular; "do" is plural.

That's kind of the basic idea of subject-verb agreement: You want to make sure that the number of things in your subject matches up with the number in your predicate. So is the subject singular or plural? If it's third person singular, the verb probably ends in an "s," even though the third person singular noun or pronoun does not.

You can learn anything! Dave it out.