The Role of Agreement in the Expression of Arguments

Abstract

Abstract Agreement is the linguistic phenomenon in which particular features of one element in a clause (the ‘controller’) determine the morphological shape of another element (the ‘target’). Agreement comes in many forms: there are many elements that can act as the controller and target in an agreement relation, and there is also considerable cross-linguistic variation in the amount and types of features for which agreement relations can be established (see Corbett 1994 for an overview).