Agreement Features, Agreement and Antiagreement

Abstract

There are empirical reasons to think that the role traditionally assigned to specialized categorial features such as [V] and [N] is performed by independently needed features, some of which are agreement features. In appropriate contexts, the verbal feature reduces to [PERSON] and the nominal feature to [CLASS]. This view, along with the fact that agreement features come in bundles, leads to a novel way of looking at verb–subject agreement. Understood as the reflex of feature-matching and deletion, verb–subject agreement is essentially a mechanism of categorization by computation. It leads to deletion of the nominal agreement feature from the verb and related functional heads and the verbal agreement feature from the subject. Further empirical support for this way of looking at agreement comes from the antiagreement phenomenon, which turns out to be a reflex of the peculiar categorial identity of the predicate in relevant sentences. The examples used in the article are mainly from Berber.