Abstract

The features of lexical items interact through agreement to influence the shape of syntactic structure and the process of semantic interpretation. We can often tell from the form of a construction that agreement has taken place: the value of a particular feature is morphologically represented on more than one lexical item, even though semantic interpretation may be lacking on some of these lexical items. Less obvious is the nature of the process that yields agreement in the first place. Less obvious as well is the syntax of the output of this process. Because of the central role played by agreement in syntactic theory, much work over the last decade has been devoted to all these topics.