Agreement is often carried out in such a way that the verb agrees with noun phrases higher in animacy, and fails to agree with those lower in animacy, even where this overrides, in particular cases or in general, grammatical relations, the unusual determiners of agreement cross-linguistically.
Standardized
IF verbs agree with inanimate NPs, THEN they also agree with animate NPs of the same grammatical relation, or even of a grammatical relation lower on the relational hierarchy which otherwise determines agreement preferences.
