British agree a different valence


This post will no doubt reveal to the world that I am not a frequent reader of British news sources. This morning I added a little BBC news widged to my customized google page, and found the headline Zimbabwe leaders agree talks pact. “That’s strange,” thought I. A search for “agree” on the BBC news site revealed several more transitive uses:

EU agrees radical farm reform

Bevan agrees a new dea

Santander agrees £1.2bn A&L deal

Then I decided to actually check a dictionary, and found that the Dictionary.com one (based on Random House Unabridged) lists as sense 10:

Chiefly British. to consent to or concur with: We agree the stipulations. I must agree your plans.

I wonder why Americans decided to do away with this particular valence. Default hypothesis: because it sounds snooty. But I’m willing to entertain other ideas.

Posted July 21, 2008 to Form, Linguistics
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2 Comments so far

  1. The Ridger on July 24th, 2008

    I think it’s because “agree to” and “agree on” aren’t the same, and you can’t tell which plain “agree” is meant to be. At least the Brits haven’t subsumed “agree with” into this usage.

  2. Russell on July 27th, 2008

    Hmm, right. So “agree with her” isn’t “agree her.” But I don’t think every sense of “agree on” is covered. Like, it doesn’t seem as though “we agree net neutrality” can be used to mean “we agree on (the topic of) net neutrality).” So I think the closest thing to “agree X” is probably “agree to X,” though some uses of it may be equivalent to “agree on X.”

    I wonder if there are any other cases like this, where American English has only versions with prepositions, while British has retained (or innovated) a bare noun phrase use. I can think of something like “hate on,” but that’s an American (?) innovation; and we still have plain old “hate.”