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. 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.' Additional concerns appear in compound subjects in languages other than English. In many European languages, for example, a standard problem occurs with mixed-gender compound subjects. This problem does not appear in English, because they is genderless. But e.g. French has masculine ils vs. feminine elles; Spanish similarly has masculine ellos vs. feminine ellas. In addition, Arabic has gender as well as person and number agreement on its verbs, and more specifically in its literary language and in the more conservative spoken varieties, there is gender agreement with third-person plural subjects. In addition, some languages allow subjects to follow verbs: either optionally for stylistic reasons, as in German, Latin or occasionally in English ('Now are entering John, Jim, and their wives'); as the normal state of affairs, as in Classical Arabic and Irish, where subjects precede the verb only for stylistic reasons; or even as a mandatory requirement, in languages with V-S-O or V-O-S word order and a strongly fixed word order. These languages often use different strategies for handling subjects after vs. before the verb: for example, tending to prefer an 'agree with the closest phrase' strategy with a following subject, for pragmatic reasons, even when an 'agree with the whole' strategy is used in other circumstances.