Common use of Verb Agreement Clause in Contracts

Verb Agreement. Given that the noun classes in Gitonga cannot be easily categorized based on their semantic properties, and seeing how some of the noun classes (e.g., noun classes 1, 3, and 9) take more than one noun class prefix or no noun class prefix, it is verb agreement that is a consistent indicator of noun-class membership. In basic sentences, such as (51), the verb is prefixed by a morpheme that agrees in class with the subject noun. In all three cases (51) this verb prefix is ‘a-’, as it corresponds to a noun class 1 subject. Note that regardless of the semantic properties of the noun stem or the class 1 prefix that the noun stem takes – an ‘N-’ prefix on (51a), ‘mu-’ for (51b) and ‘Ø’ for (51c) – what defines these three nouns as pertaining to noun class 1 is that all three share the same verbal agreement morpheme ‘a-’.