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”).

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Meanings

nounmonstrous agreement (uncountable)
  1. uncountablehuman sciencesThe 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
    2 more examples

    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

    Interestingly, not all speakers accept the monstrous agreement pattern. There are speakers for whom examples like (3a) sound very unnatural (while not totally ungrammatical).

    2021, Mikhail Knyazev, “Inter-Speaker Variation and Construction-Specific Restrictions on Indexical Shift in Poshkart Chuvash”, in Julia Sinitsyna, Sergei Tatevosov, editors, Proceedings of the 15th Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics (MIT Working Papers in Linguistics), page 97

Origin

Coined by linguist Sandhya Sundaresan in 2011.

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Cite this entry
APA

monstrous agreement. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/monstrous%20agreement

MLA

“monstrous agreement.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/monstrous%20agreement. Accessed November 4, 2026.

Chicago

WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “monstrous agreement,” accessed November 4, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/monstrous%20agreement.

Source: monstrous agreement on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.