Description: In this tour de force of syntactic argumentation, Sandra Chung shows that two distinct forms of agreement must be recognized in linguistic theory. She demonstrates that in addition to what she calls Feature Compatibility -- the relation that lies behind morphological agreement, such as subject-verb agreement in English -- there is an abstract syntactic relation, the Associate relation, which holds between categories in a range of syntactic constructions. Her primary source of evidence is Chamorro, a language of the Austro-nesian family spoken on Guam and Saipan. She also consistently relates her analyses to what is known about analogous constructions in English, Italian, Irish, Japanese, Maori, and various other languages.

The Design of Agreement is a significant step in the effort to uncover the fundamental building blocks-that serve to organize natural language systems. Chung's extensive study of agreement and its connection to the rest of grammar is a striking contribution to linguistic theory.

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