TOWARDS A LEXICON-BASED THEORY OF AGREEMENT

In this paper, agreement is treated as a phenomenon in the syntactic-semantic interface. In syntax, agreement is a relation between syntactic constituents which is induced by particular agreement features. In semantics, agreement is a grammatical means of keeping record of individual referents. In languages which display agreement, constituents which relate to the same referent agree with each other. The target of agreement is always a noun Which bears, agreement features by its inherent lexical class (often due to the semantic sort of its referents). Other categories apart from the noun can obtain affixes in order to bear agreement features, which determine what sort of arguments can occur with respect to a grammatical checking procedure. I will treat agreement features as indexes associated with an individual variable under a binder. Syntactic constituents which are co-indexed in this way must be checked as to whether the respective agreement features unify or not. © 1994, Walter de Gruyter. All rights reserved.