Few linguistic phenomena come up as often in Czech as the subject-predicate congruence. No, don’t worry, I’m definitely not going to write this article in Latin, I just wanted to scare you. It is, of course, nothing else than the well-known agreement of the predicate with the subject.
The fact that the ending of a predicate (usually a verb) changes depending on the subject in Czech is a matter of general knowledge. In this article, we will deal with the agreement of the predicate with the subject in the past tense, because this is the area in which mistakes are most often made.
Simple subject – simple rules
We won’t be here long. Just for the sake of order, we will skim over the rules for the agreement of a predicate with a simple subject.
If such a subject is singular, then of course the predicate has the ending -l for the subject in the masculine gender (animate and inanimate), the ending -la for the subject in the feminine gender and finally the ending -lo for the subject in the neuter gender in the past tense. In practice it looks like this:
Pavel came to the dining room
The company went bankrupt a week ago.
The rule in question only applied for a short tim
Almost a shame to write about it, right? Even the rules for the subject in the plural, i.e. the plural, usually do not cause us difficulties. The masculine animate gender means the predicate ending -li , the masculine inanimate -ly . The feminine also has the same ending, -ly , in the plural.
It is perhaps only wrong with the subject in the neuter gender, which has the ending -la in the predicate in the plural . In colloquial Czech, we often replace it analogically with the ending -ly , but this substitution is not permissible in written Czech and is considered an error.
Again a few examples:
The students lined up in groups of five. (male, living)
The peaks of the mountains towered above us . (male, deceased)
Both amendments passed the first reading. (female)
The playgrounds were built thanks to subsidies. (mid year)
As we have already said, it is necessary to take care especially of cases with middle gender. This applies not only to plural nouns, but also to plural nouns. As in this sentence:
The gate closed after dark . (Wed.) – Not: “The gates were closed after dark.”
And even though it is often reminded that the japan phone number data subject “children” requires a hard -ly in the predicate, the wrong ending -li is still introduced into the texts , so let’s try not to make a mistake in that too.
On the patch, the children chased meruna
Multiple subject
Real wrinkles on the forehead are already caused by a multiple subject, i.e. one that consists of two or more elements. So what – if all the elements in the selection how does it work? are of the same genus, nothing actually changes compared to the above rules, and hey. For example, there is no difference between the following sentences in terms of predicate endings:
The students lined up in groups of five.
Pupils and teachers lined up in five steps.
Both elements of the multiple subject in the second cz lists sentence are of the same gender (masculine) so the situation is the same as if the subject were simple plural.