Agreement without agree: scattered, not distributed, agreement across modules

Abstract In this paper we present an approach to agreement where different agreement processes occur at different levels. We argue that φ-feature valuation is never the trigger of a checking relation between a head H and an NP, but the effect of a syntactic relation that must be triggered by some independent operation. We analyze in detail characteristic cases where agreement is not syntactic but induced in the morphological component or in processing. We also show that all these cases are indirectly determined by syntactic derivations where the φ-feature matrix in the head H is not fully specified, leaving room for additional, extra-syntactic, operations to tamper with agreement.