Common use of Definitions of Clause in Contracts

Definitions of. ‘agreement’ and ‘collective noun’ The word 'agreement' (or concord) can be defined as “a formal relationship between elements, whereby a form of one word requires a corresponding form of another” (Crystal 1997: 14), or, according to Xxxxx et al (1985: 755) concord can be defined as the relationship between two grammatical units such that one of them displays a feature (e.g. plurality) that accords with a displayed (or semantically implicit) feature in the other. Quirk et al’s definition makes one important thing explicit, namely, that a form can sometimes agree with a feature of another that is only implicitly present, but is not visible in the latter’s form. In our case, this feature is the formally unexpressed idea of plurality, which underlies collective noun subjects. Most linguists say that when it comes to collective nouns, singular agreement is used when the referent of the noun is thought of as a unit and plural agreement when the referent of the noun is thought of as a number of individuals (Xxxxx 2001:11). Xxxxxxxxx (1909–1949 II: 93) adds to this general statement that the issue of animacy should also be considered when one discusses collective nouns. Xxxxxxxxx accepts the definition of a collective as “a substantive which denotes a collection or number of individuals”, but, he says that plural agreement is only used when the noun denotes living beings. Although this goes a long way toward explaining patterns of agreement with collective nouns, more factors need to be taken into account before any conclusions can be drawn about singular/plural agreement with collective nouns. In this study we will address some of these additional factors (see Sections 4 and 5).