Unifying nominal and verbal inflection: Agreement and feature realization

Remarks on Nominalization argues that the parallel syntax of nominal and verbal projections originates in abstract principles that generalise over the two domains. This line of analysis gave rise to the development of X-bar theory (Jackendoff 1977) and the theory of extended projection (Grimshaw 1991). In this chapter we will pursue this theme, but instead of focusing on the internal structure of NP and VP, we will consider agreement phenomena. This is of interest, because it is arguably the case that there are two distinct phenomena, one which appears to be common in the VP and one which appears to be common in the NP. We refer to the two phenomena as agreement and concord, respectively. (For a discussion of terminology, see Corbett 2006:5-7; for an overview of the typology of and approaches to concord, see Norris 2017.)