Abstract
In this paper we present an approach to agreement where different agreement processes occur at different levels. We argue that φ-feature valuation is never the trigger of a checking relation between a head H and an NP, but the effect of a syntactic relation that must be triggered by some independent operation. We analyze in detail characteristic cases where agreement is not syntactic but induced in the morphological component or in processing. We also show that all these cases are indirectly determined by syntactic derivations where the φ-feature matrix in the head H is not fully specified, leaving room for additional, extra-syntactic, operations to tamper with agreement.
Funding source: The Junta de Extremadura’s grant
Award Identifier / Grant number: HUM 022
Funding source: The Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación
Award Identifier / Grant number: PID2021-123617NB-C41
Acknowledgements
The two authors, listed in alphabetical order, are equally responsible for the entire content of the paper. We are grateful to the members of the Basque Center for Language Research (HiTT) and the participants at the Linguistics Colloquia at the University of Ottawa, where we presented a previous version of this paper. Especial thanks to the editors of this volume, Arantzazu Elordieta and Laura Vela, and to Alejo Alcaraz, Ricardo Etxepare, Jairo Nunes, Dennis Ott, Francesc Roca, Myriam Uribe-Etxebarria, and two anonymous reviewers for many valuable comments.
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Research funding: This work was financed in part by the Junta de Extremadura’s grant HUM 022, and by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación grant PID2021-123617NB-C41 Microparameters and Networks in Romance Variation (MINERVA) to the second author.
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© 2025 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- AGREEment and ellipsis
- Coerced inflected infinitives in Portuguese
- Agreement without agree: scattered, not distributed, agreement across modules
- Two routes to predicate ellipsis in Spanish: the clitic versus focus strategy
- Rethinking Right-node Raising
- No ellipsis-contained antecedents: adjunct-licensed ellipsis in Spanish
- Sloppy symmetry under ellipsis
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- AGREEment and ellipsis
- Coerced inflected infinitives in Portuguese
- Agreement without agree: scattered, not distributed, agreement across modules
- Two routes to predicate ellipsis in Spanish: the clitic versus focus strategy
- Rethinking Right-node Raising
- No ellipsis-contained antecedents: adjunct-licensed ellipsis in Spanish
- Sloppy symmetry under ellipsis