Abstract
Grammatical agreement is a relation between word forms or syntactic constituents: the verb may agree with the subject, the attribute with the head noun, and the pronoun with a preceding noun phrase. The agreeing elements share certain features of person (1st, 2nd, or 3rd), number (plural or singular), or gender (femininum or masculinum), which means that they provide information about the same discourse referent. For instance, both the German verb form komm-st 2sg and the pronoun du 2sg relate to the singular addressee of an utterance ( du kommst ‘you come’). In the composition of syntactic phrases and clauses, agreement features specified in individual words are unified, hence, must be compatible in order to yield a grammatical structure. The elements that agree need not be adjacent to each other; it is then often only the agreement information that allows to relate these elements (non-local agreement). If no agreeing partner is available, only the default word form can be used (Latin pluit 3sg ‘it rains’). Typologically, languages widely differ in the extent to which agreement is established: some languages lack agreement altogether, some languages show agreement only in certain contexts, while other languages require multiple agreement.
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