What is a proximity concord in English grammar? Proximity concord falls under subject-verb agreement. In order to thoroughly understand what a proximity concord is, let us take a look at the words that make the phrase one after the other and see what each means.
Proximity means nearness in distance or time whereas concord simply means subject-verb agreement. Subject-verb agreement is the agreement relations that exist between two grammatical units. This means a subject of a sentence should always agree with its verb. The basic rule governing concord or subject-verb agreement is that a singular subject should always agree with a singular verb and vice versa.
So for example:
- The boy goes to school.
- The children go to church every Sunday.
From the examples above, you can clearly see in sentence 1 that our singular subject ‘boy’ agrees with a singular verb ‘goes’.
In sentence number 2 you can also see that we have a plural subject ‘children’ which is agreeing with a plural verb ‘go’.
Let us move our attention back to proximity concord because that happens to be our topic for the day. Proximity concords are a type of subject-verb agreement in which we have two or more subjects in a sentence joined together by ‘either…..or, neither……nor, not only……..but also’. The rule of proximity concord states that the verb in the sentence should always agree with the subject closer to the verb hence the name proximity concord. Remember what I told you about proximity? It means nearness in distance.
Let us look at the examples of proximity concord below:
- Either John or the children are in the house.
From the sentence above you can see that we have two subjects ‘John’ and ‘children’. The first subject ‘John’ is singular whereas the second ‘children’ is plural. We have a plural verb ‘are’. The reason we used a plural verb ‘are’ is because of the fact that we are dealing with a proximity concord here, and the rule of proximity concord states that verb in the sentence should always agree with the subject closest to it. Of the two subjects we have in the sentence ‘John’ and ‘children’ you can clearly see that ‘children’ is closer to the verb ‘are’ than ‘John’ is. So we make sure that the plural subject ‘children’ agrees with the plural verb ‘are’.
Some other examples of proximity concord:
- Either the boys or the girl goes to school.
- Neither James nor the laborers are at work.
- Not only the students but also the teacher is unhappy about the results.
- Neither the headmaster nor the teacher, nor anyone else likes the result.
- Either your brakes or your eyesight is at fault.
From the examples above, the subjects of the various sentences have been made bold. The verbs have also been indicated in italics. Each verb agrees with the subject that is closer to it. If the subject is plural then the verb automatically is plural; if the subject is singular then the verb is also singular.
This is all about proximity concord. I hope that at this point you have been able to get a fair idea as to what a proximity concord is all about.
For more on concord or subject verb agreement click here.
Source: English Grammar Lectures, 2009.
