A Theory of Agreement and its Application to Serbo-Croatian

Four lexical features of a noun are relevant to agreement: (i) semantic conditions on reference, (ii) person, number, and gender features of the referential index, (iii) concord features, and (iv) declension class. These four features are correlated by a chain of binary constraints. When individual constraints are violated, the chain is broken, resulting in intricate patterns of mixed agreement. Three main types of mixed agreement are predicted, all of them attested in Serbo-Croatian. This theory helps explain Corbett's (1983) crosslinguistic agreement hierarchy.