A Theory of Agreement and Its Application to Serbo-Croatian

Abstract

1. OVERVIEW OF A THEORY OF AGREEMENT. Any treatment of morphosyntactic agreement must face those aberrant cases of HYBRID or MIXED agreement. In certain situations for example a noun triggers one set of agreement features on adjectives but the NP headed by that noun triggers a different set of agreement features on verbs or coreferential pronouns; or a noun triggers masculine features on adjectives and pronouns but belongs to the declension class normally reserved for feminine nouns, and so on. These exceptional cases also shed light on regular agreement processes. We present a theory of agreement and apply it to Serbo-Croatian, which, like its Slavic relatives, is richly endowed with regular and hybrid agreement. The mixed agreement patterns that are predicted by the theory, and no others, are attested in that language. Our theory may be summarized as follows. An inflected noun has two different feature sets that determine the agreement values it triggers: CONCORD features (case, number, and gender, for Serbo-Croatian); and the person, number, and gender features of the REFERENTIAL INDEX (Pollard & Sag 1994).1 The concord feature of gender for a given noun is closely related to that noun's declension class, as schematized in 1.