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monstrous agreement

monstrous agreement noun: the phenomenon, in certain languages, of anaphoric references within an item of reported speech to the subject of the report agreeing in the first person (equivalent to *“He said that he am coming”).

Noun

monstrous agreement (uncountable)

  1. The phenomenon, in certain languages, of anaphoric references within an item of reported speech to the subject of the report agreeing in the first person (equivalent to *“He said that he am coming”).
    • Why can’t we analyze them as quotation (full or partial/mixed)? Because grammatical dependencies cannot cross quotation marks, whereas in monstrous agreement they do.2020, Rahul Balusu, “The Quotative Complementizer Says “I’m too Baroque for that””, in Bhamati Dash, Gurmeet Kaur, editors, Proceedings of FASAL 8, page 6
    • McFadden shows that in case of monstrous agreement, allocutive agreement in the lower clause must reflect the relationship of the author of the embedded speech act to the addressee of that same speech act, and not the addressee of the overall speech act.2020, Peter W. Smith, Johannes Mursell, Katharina Hartmann, “Some remarks on agreement within the Minimalist Programme”, in Agree to Agree: Agreement in the Minimalist Programme, →ISBN, page 24

Origin of monstrous agreement

Coined by linguist Sandhya Sundaresan in 2011.

Questions about monstrous agreement

What does monstrous agreement mean?
Monstrous agreement means the phenomenon, in certain languages, of anaphoric references within an item of reported speech to the subject of the report agreeing in the first person (equivalent to *“He said that he am coming”).
What part of speech is monstrous agreement?
Monstrous agreement is a noun.

Words near monstrous agreement in the dictionary

  1. monstrosify
  2. monstrosifying
  3. monstrosities
  4. monstrosity
  5. monstrous
  6. monstrous agreement
  7. monstrous moonshine
  8. monstrous regiment
  9. monstrousest
  10. monstrously
  11. monstrousness

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: monstrous agreement (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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