Agreement in Role and Reference Grammar: a Typology of Possible Targets
Agreement in Role and Reference Grammar: a Typology of Possible Targets

Summary/Abstract: This paper presents a sketch of a theory of agreement within the framework of Role and Reference Grammar and proposes an implicational universal that can be formulated rather elegantly due to RRG’s conception of the layered structure of the clause. It is argued that, in the RRG framework, controllers of agreement are always elements represented in the Constituent Projection, while targets of agreement may be represented both in the Constituent Projection and in the Operator Projection. On the basis of a sample of 300 languages, we propose an implicational universal stating that languages cannot have agreement on operators, unless they also have agreement on syntactic elements represented on the constituent projection (the converse does not hold). This claim can be shown to have very few apparent counter–examples, and holds for both the domains of the NP (RP) and the Clause. It lends further support to the distinction between operator projection and constituent projection, which is one of the foundations of RRG’s approach to syntax.

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