Relation between Agreement Domains and Morpho-syntactic and Semantic Information

This paper focuses on differences of various agreement phenomena in British English such as subject-verb agreement, agreement inside noun phrases and pronoun-antecedent agreement in the framework of the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 2000, 2001). Ferguson & Barlow (1988) describe agreement as a phenomenon whereby a grammatical element X matches a grammatical element Y in property Z. Using this definition, we can characterize subject-verb agreement as a phenomenon in which an adnominal element Y that functions as subject matches a verb in phi-features like person, number and gender. Concord is agreement where X and Y both occur inside a noun phrase. Pronoun-antecedent agreement is the process that pronoun and antecedent share the same features. The main ideas advanced here are as follows. First, there is a syntactic parameter which distinguishes British English from American English with respect to the realization of number agreement. Second, in British English, certain agreement processes can refer to the Mereology feature (cf. Sauerland & Elbourne 2002). Third, agreement inside a phase depends on the formal feature on nouns and agreement across phases can refer to the Mereology feature. Pronoun-antecedent agrement can be regarded as agreement inside a phase.