Agreement beyond the Verb

Abstract Agreement is one of the most intriguing and theoretically challenging aspects of human language. It is typically thought to reflect a structural relationship between a verb and its arguments within the clause, and all major theories of agreement have been developed with the centrality of this relationship in mind. But beyond the verb, items belonging to practically every other part of speech have been found to function as agreement targets, including adpositions, adverbs, converbs, nouns, pronouns, complementizers, and other conjunctions. Data on these targets provide rich insight into the structural domains in which agreement operates, demonstrating that unusual targets can be associated with unexpected domains that are independent of the agreement domain of the verb. Following an introduction to the typology of unusual targets and unexpected domains across the world’s languages, the book provides detailed treatments of a wide range of rare and complex agreement phenomena in seven languages, belonging to five different language families of Eurasia and the Pacific. The contributions are all based on novel data, collected by the authors, which detail the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of agreement on non-verbal targets within the clause. This volume will be of interest to researchers and students from graduate level upwards in the fields of typology, morphology, syntax, and semantics.