A theory of agreement and its application to Serbo-Croatian

Four lexical features of a noun are relevant to agreement: (i) semantic con ditions on reference, (ii) person, number, md gender features of the refere ntial index, (iii) concord features, and (iv) declension class. These four features are correlated by a chain of binary constraints. When individual c onstraints are violated, the chain is broken, resulting in intricate patter ns of mixed agreement. Three main types of mixed agreement are predicted, a ll of them attested in Serbo-Croatian. This theory helps explain Corbett's (1983) crosslinguistic AGREEMENT HIERARCHY.*.