Agreement and Its Failures
Omer Preminger
The MIT Press
<P>In this book, Omer Preminger investigates how the obligatory nature of                 predicate-argument agreement is enforced by the grammar. Preminger argues that an                 empirically adequate theory of predicate-argument agreement requires recourse to an                 operation, whose obligatoriness is a grammatical primitive not reducible to                 representational properties, but whose successful culmination is not enforced by the                 grammar. </P><P>Preminger's argument counters contemporary approaches                 that find the obligatoriness of predicate-argument agreement enforced through                 representational means. The most prominent of these is Chomsky's                 "interpretability"-based proposal, in which the obligatoriness of                 predicate-argument agreement is enforced through derivational time bombs. Preminger                 presents an empirical argument against contemporary approaches that seek to derive                 the obligatory nature of predicate-argument agreement exclusively from                 <I>derivational time bombs</I>. He offers instead an alternative account                 based on the notion of <I>obligatory operations </I>better suited to the                 facts. The crucial data involves utterances that inescapably involve                 attempted-but-failed agreement and are nonetheless fully grammatical. Preminger                 combines a detailed empirical investigation of agreement phenomena in the Kichean                 (Mayan) languages, Zulu (Bantu), Basque, Icelandic, and French with an extensive and                 rigorous theoretical exploration of the far-reaching consequences of these data. The                 result is a novel proposal that has profound implications for the formalism that the                 theory of grammar uses to derive obligatory processes and properties. </P>