The Design of Agreement

by Sandra Chung

In this new study of agreement, Sandra Chung proposes that linguistic theory must recognize not one but two agreement relations - a featural relation that lies behind agreement's impact on the form of words and a configurational relation that lies behind agreement's impact on syntactic structure. She identifies the two relations and argues that neither can be reduced to the other. She then investigates the effects of the configurational relation, called the Associate relation, exposing its contribution to the rules and principles that organize syntactic constructions in a range of languages. Chung supports her view of agreement with extensive evidence from Chamorro, an Austronesian language spoken on Guam and Saipan. In so doing, she offers the most comprehensive analysis of the syntax of Chamorro that has appeared to date.