Constraints on Agreement

Minimalist research on syntactic dependencies over the past two decades has sought a unified understanding of the behavior of ϕ-agreement (such as subject–verb agreement) and of more traditionally studied long-distance dependencies, such as wh -movement. Both have been attributed to a single abstract operation, Agree. In this review, I discuss proposed constraints on Agree-based dependencies arising from the structures in which Agree operates, from the features and feature structures in terms of which Agree is stated, and from the specifications of participants to Agree (probes and goals) that control fine-grained aspects of how features are transferred (interaction) and when probing halts (satisfaction). Relevant theoretical concepts include cyclic structure building, minimality, phases, and feature geometries.