Agreement as a Discourse Phenomenon

Agreement is widely considered to be the prime example of a relation based on linguistic form in which the morphosyntactic specification of one category, such as a subject noun phrase, is redundantly expressed on a separate category such as a verb. In this paper, I discuss the problems inherent in such morphosyntactic accounts of agreement and argue that the consideration of a range of attested agreement patterns leads naturally to an account in which agreement relations are seen as links between discourse information structures. Taking a discourse perspective avoids the descriptive problems associated with current syntactic approaches to agreement and leads to a revealing reconsideration of the nature of agreement relations