The class will provide an overview of the key components of the syntactic operation Agree, starting with Chomsky’s (2000,2001) definition and subsequently comparing it to the newest developments of Agree theories that question either the direction of Agree (Bjorkman & Zeijlstra 2019), the one-to-one requirement of Agree (Hiraiwa 2004, Béjar & Rezac 2009, Deal 2023), or its place in the architecture (Arregi & Nevins 2012, Smith 2015). More often than not these Agree theories are motivated by a range of agreement phenomena that go beyond subject-verb agreement in English. Hence, we will look at PCC effects, inverse languages, agreement alternations with conjunctions and collective nouns, and omnivorous agreement. The complexity of these agreement patterns shape our view of feature systems and challenge the original motivation of Agree to take place in the first place, i.e. uninterpretability.

In the second part of the class, we will consider instances where Agree has been used to derive phenomena that do not necessarily relate to ϕ-feature agreement, such as nominal licensing (Kalin 2018), Binding Principle A (Hicks 2005), and Negative Concord (Zeijlstra 2004). Interestingly, uninterpretability plays a much more significant role in such accounts. The class will provide a general overview over the phenomena, how they have been derived independently and why they have received an Agree-based account instead.

The aim of this class is to understand how empirical observations can inform, challenge, and question an established theory. You will gain a complex understanding of the Agree operation, its relevance to current discussions in the field and how one can contribute to such discussions. You will be able to single out comparison points between theories and evaluate which predictions they make regarding novel data sets. More generally, this class will also inform you about the theoretical landscape of the field, especially in how far the standard notion of a syntactic operation can exist alongside its many competitors.

Level: advanced