When agreement gets trigger‐happy

A number of cases are examined in which more than one controller is available for a particular agreement slot, a phenomenon that is referred to as ‘trigger‐happy’ agreement. It is argued that trigger‐happy agreement is a reasonably well‐defined phenomenon, although it does form one end of a cline—essentially of grammaticalisation—that has ‘well behaved’ agreement at the other end. It is shown that trigger‐happy agreement shares a number of general properties with agreement in general, in particular sensitivity to topicality and topicworthiness. Possible alternative analyses of trigger‐happy agreement are considered and rejected as a general solution.