Agreement of the past participle in Romance languages: Morphosyntactic approach

The aim of this article is to present a unified analysis of Romance past participle agreement. Data from 19 standard and non-standard Romance varieties are considered. It is shown that in order to account for the variation found across the various Romance varieties, past participle agreement should not be considered as following simply from another module of the grammar, such as Case Theory, co-indexation or the theory of functional categories, but should rather be considered from the point of view of a general theory of grammatical agreement. It is also shown that past participle agreement must be treated as an example of nominal-modifier agreement rather than as an example of verb-argument agreement.