chomsky first proposed that the n node in a clause carries with it all the features to include person, number and gender. in english, we rely on nouns to determine the phi-features of a word, but some other languages rely on inflections of the different parts of speech to determine person, number and gender of the nominal phrases to which they refer. mainly verbs and adjectives are responsible for bearing inflections which signal the phi-features of a particular subject or object. verbs appear to be responsible for carrying the most features and tend to carry person, number and gender agreements cross-linguistically for both subjects and objects. adjectives also carry phi-features in some languages, however, they tend to agree in number and gender but rarely for person.