ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that agreement (Agr) must be given a special status in the class of functional categories: it does not have all the characteristics shared by ordinary functional heads, but it has selectional and licensing properties of its own. It demonstrates that an adequate theory of agreement phenomena must sharply distinguish between the distributional and construal properties of the category Agr and the properties of the feature-sharing process known as Specifier-Head agreement. The morphology affixed to conjugated prepositions does not differ in crucial ways from the agreement marker appearing in synthetic verbal forms. It is a "rich" inflection, specified for the number and person features of the pronominal argument realized in the position it governs. The specific analysis establishes a very tight connection between incorporation into Agr and the rich/poor agreement alternation observed in many verb-initial languages. The chapter examines the status of the category Agr in Welsh.
