set of entities involved, work out their properties, and assign a pronoun accordingly. (E.g. if the set of entities includes two women referred to in the third person, and the language has grammatical dual, as in Arabic, then the group's properties would be "dual number, female, third person", with corresponding pronoun humatā.) Closest agreement: Simply agree with the constituent noun phrase that is closest to the verb, and ignore the rest. This generally applies only to subject-verb agreement; pronominal agreement is by its nature long-distance, and so the concept of "closest" makes less sense in this case. If using "general agreement" and there is a disagreement among properties (e.g. some male, some female), either: Choose one (the traditional rule for most languages has been to treat mixed groups as male; some modern rules, on the other hand, call for randomly choosing one sex or the other, alternating choosing male and female in successive similar circumstances, or even for simply choosing the female gender in all cases). Use a construction (e.g. "he or she", "his or her", "our(s)") that captures both or all values of the disagreeing property. Often this is considered awkward and to be avoided. Additional concerns in English An additional concern in English is that there are special rules for pronouns in compound subjects. Although English has morphological case distinctions in pronouns (e.g. I vs. me), grammatical case is not a living characteristic of the spoken language, and hence the case-based terms subjective case (e.g. for I) vs. objective case (e.g. for me) are misleading. In general, in the spoken language, me is the default form, but I for an argument of a verb when occurring directly before a finite verb. On the other hand, in compound subjects in informal speech, me occurs in this position, e.g. Johnny and me are coming tomorrow (possibly because of the lack of direct agreement between me and are). Children are often taught in school as a matter of politeness that they should always order oneself after any others in a compound subject and use I, saying Johnny and I instead of I and Johnny and in a compound object use Johnny and me instead of me and Johnny. Although intended specifically for compound subjects, when adopted by speakers it typically is generalized to compound objects, leading to alternations such as between me and you vs. between you and I. References Bibliography