Defacing Agreement

This paper contributes to the debate over the number of features needed in order to offer an adequate analysis of agreement. Traditional grammar and some recent proposals, notably by Alsina and Arsenijević (2012a, b, c), operate with two types -- what is conventionally referred to as syntactic versus semantic agreement. Adopting Wechsler and Zlatić's (2000: 800, 2003, 2012) model, which envisages a division into three types of agreement (two syntactic ones, in addition to a separate, purely semantic feature), this paper argues that we need such a tripartition, because without it we cannot account for the facts in languages like Serbian/Croatian, English and Bulgarian.