Agreement Subtleties and Conflicts

Basic agreement is a B1 topic: a finite verb agrees with its subject in person and number, an adjective with its noun in gender, number, and case. This page is for the cases where that tidy picture breaks down — where the verb does not agree with the word that looks like the subject, where two coordinated nouns of different genders force a decision the simple rule never anticipated, and where a participle has to agree with something across a passive or a perfect. Three threads run through all of it, and if you hold onto them the "exceptions" stop being arbitrary: (1) Icelandic agreement targets the nominative, whatever its grammatical role; (2) a coordinated, mixed bag resolves to neuter plural — the same default that gives the pronoun þau; (3) participles agree like adjectives, with the nominative argument. (For ordinary adjective agreement see agreement-tricky; for quirky subjects, the overview.)

Quirky subjects: the verb agrees with the nominative theme

You have met quirky subjects — subjects in a non-nominative case, assigned by the verb: dative with líka "like", leiðast "be bored", finnast "find/think"; accusative with vanta "need". The subtle agreement fact is this: the finite verb does not agree with the quirky (dative/accusative) subject. It agrees with the nominative argument — the theme — which in these constructions is the thing liked, needed, or found. The quirky subject sits in subject position and controls word order and binding, but it is invisible to verb agreement, because agreement only ever reaches for the nominative.

Singular theme → singular verb; plural theme → plural verb — and the dative subject does not change either way:

This is the agreement signature of a quirky-subject construction, and it is genuinely counter-intuitive for an English speaker, because English "he likes the presents" agrees the verb with he. In Icelandic the experiencer is dative and agreementally inert; the verb tracks the liked thing. Once you internalise "agreement = nominative-hunting", Honum líkuðu gjafirnar stops being weird: the only nominative in the clause is gjafirnar, plural, so the verb is plural.

Coordinated subjects: gender resolution to neuter plural

When two (or more) singular nouns are joined by og "and" to form a plural subject, the verb is straightforwardly plural — no surprise there. The interesting question is gender, which surfaces on any agreeing predicate adjective or participle. If the conjuncts share a gender, the predicate takes that gender. But if they are mixed — a masculine and a feminine, or any combination that isn't uniform — Icelandic resolves to the neuter plural. Neuter is the default / unmarked gender, the one Icelandic falls back on whenever the input is heterogeneous.

This is exactly the rule behind the personal pronoun þau "they" for a mixed-gender group. A group of men is þeir (masc.), a group of women þær (fem.), but a mixed group is þau (neuter) — and a predicate about them is neuter too: Þau eru ánægð. So the coordination rule is not an isolated stipulation; it is the same neuter-as-default-for-a-mix principle that governs þau, applied to two named conjuncts instead of a pronoun. Learn it once, and the pronoun and the coordination case reinforce each other.

A practical note on which genders trigger neuter: any combination that isn't uniformly masculine or uniformly feminine goes neuter. Two masculines stay masculine (Jón og Pétur eru ánægðir), two feminines stay feminine (María og Anna eru ánægðar), but the moment a neuter or a second gender enters the mix, the resolution is neuter plural.

Existential það-sentences: agree with the associate

In an existential or presentational sentence the expletive það fills the front slot, and the real, postverbal noun — the associate — is what the verb agrees with. það is grammatically neuter singular, but it does not control number agreement; the associate does. A plural associate forces a plural verb even though the dummy það up front is singular.

This is the nominative-hunting principle again: the associate is the only nominative in the clause, so it controls agreement; the expletive það is a placeholder, not a real subject. English does something similar in "there are many guests" (agreeing with guests, not there), so the concept transfers — but Icelandic applies it consistently, and the expletive's neuter-singular shape must not lure you into a singular verb.

Participle agreement in passives and perfects

A past participle in Icelandic is an adjective, and it agrees like one — in gender, number, and case — with the nominative argument it predicates over. This shows up in two big places: the periphrastic passive (vera + participle) and, for some verbs, the perfect.

In the passive, the participle agrees with the promoted subject (the underlying object, now nominative):

Contrast this sharply with the perfect formed with hafa, where the supine is invariant — it does not agree, because hafa + supine is a fixed verbal form, not an adjectival predication. Ég hef keypt bækurnar "I have bought the books" keeps keypt uninflected no matter the object. The agreement appears only when the participle is genuinely predicative/adjectival — the vera-passive, the vera-resultative, and adjectival uses — not in the hafa-perfect. This split is one of the cleaner tests for whether you are looking at a true adjectival participle or a frozen supine.

Why this is hard for English speakers

English agreement is minimal — a verb shows only a third-person-singular -s, adjectives and participles never inflect at all. So every thread on this page is invisible in English and has no transfer intuition. The traps are predictable. Learners agree the verb with the dative experiencer of a quirky verb (*Honum líkar gjafirnar, copying English "he likes the presents") instead of with the nominative theme. They reach for a masculine plural predicate for a mixed group (*Jón og María eru ánægðir), defaulting to masculine the way many European languages do, when Icelandic defaults to neuter. And they leave the passive participle uninflected (*Bækurnar voru keypt), forgetting it agrees like an adjective. The unifying fix is the two slogans: agreement targets the nominative, and a mix resolves to neuter plural.

Common Mistakes

The dative subject of a quirky verb is agreementally inert; the verb hunts for the nominative theme.

A mixed-gender conjunction takes neuter plural agreement — the same neuter you would use in the pronoun þau.

In an existential, the expletive það is a placeholder; the postverbal associate (the only nominative) controls number.

A vera-passive participle inflects for gender, number, and case to match the promoted subject.

Even with plural conjuncts, a mixed-gender group resolves to neuter plural agreement on the predicate.

Key Takeaways

• Verb agreement hunts the nominative, not "the subject". With quirky-subject verbs the dative/accusative subject is inert and the verb agrees with the nominative theme: Honum líkar maturinn (sg.) vs Honum líkuðu gjafirnar (pl.).
• A mixed-gender coordinated subject resolves the predicate to neuter plural: Jón og María eru ánægð — never masculine ánægðir. This is the same rule that gives the pronoun þau for a mixed group; neuter is Icelandic's default for a mix.
• In existential það-sentences, the verb agrees with the postverbal associate, not the singular dummy það: Það *eru margir gestir*.
• Past participles in the passive (and in vera-resultatives/adjectival uses) agree in gender, number, and case with the nominative argument — Bækurnar voru keyptar — whereas the supine in the hafa-perfect is invariant.
• English shows almost no agreement, so all of this is transfer-blind; anchor on the two slogans — agree with the nominative, a mix goes neuter plural.