Lecture Two Subject-verb Agreement：第二讲主谓一致.doc

Lecture Two Subject-verb Agreement Teaching hours: 2 Teaching aims: 1. Students will grasp the three guiding principles of subject-verb agreement. 2. Students will learn the problems of concord. Key points of teaching: the three guiding principles of subject-verb agreement; the problems of concord Time allotment: the three guiding principles.(30ms). the problems of concord.(50ms) exercises and assignment(20ms). Teaching contents: I. Three guiding principles We all know these meanings of agree, but when we talk about subject-verb agreement, were talking about something different: matching subjects and verbs according to number. That is, when you have a singular subject, you have to match it with a singular verb form: The boy plays. When you have a plural subject, you must have a plural verb form: The boys play. 1. Grammatical agreement.?? A verb must agree with its subject in person and number. Singular subjects take singular verbs, and plural subjects take plural verbs. We’ve all heard this lesson more times than we care to remember. It’s a good lesson, to be sure, but it’s not quite as simple as it sounds. One of the nice things about English is that its verbs do not change much to agree with a subject in number. In fact, for almost all verbs, there is only one change, adding -s or -es for third person singular, present tense. We say He goes, She tries, and It matters. All other persons require no changes to the verb. We say I play, You play, We play, and They play. The past tense requires its own changes to the verb, but (except for the verb be) these do not involve number. Thus we say He walked and I ran, They walked and we ran, and so on. The modal auxiliaries are an exception to the agreement rule. They do not change to show number. We say I can swim, He can swim, They can swim, and so on. The primary verb be is a unique case in that it has many different forms—am, are, is, was, were—depending on the person, number, and tense of a specific use. 2. Notional