50 ways to improve your Italian: Teach Yourself by Valeria Malandra

Author:Valeria Malandra [Malandra, Valeria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hodder Education
Published: 2011-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

27 Italian is an agreeable language

Consider these examples:

1 la bambino

2 i gatto

3 Lo studente leggi un libro.

4 Ieri mangio troppo.

These phrases are unacceptable because they fail to follow various rules of agreement.

The first example contravenes the rule on gender agreement. The correct form is:

1 la bambina

or

il bambino

The second one goes against number agreement and should be:

2 i gatti

or

il gatto

The third phrase doesn’t follow the rule about person agreement (more on this in Chapter 29). It should be:

3 Lo studente legge un libro.

The last one goes against time or verb tense agreement and should be:

4 Ieri ho mangiato troppo.

Of course, in an English sentence words have to agree too and we automatically make alterations, for example, in plural nouns and in verbs: I like football, my son likes football, my sons like football. But there tend to be fewer changes than in Italian. It is useful to be aware of the different categories of rules on agreement, as set out above.

In order to make sure that all words in a sentence agree, it is useful to identify the central word that all the others depend upon and should agree with. For instance, in la mia cara sorella, the central word is sorella, and the other words – definite article (la) and adjectives (mia cara) – must have a form that matches it.

The table below gives some more examples of typical incorrect phrases where the agreement has been overlooked or done wrongly (), together with its correct format ().

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