ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the formal features of number, gender, person, case, and definiteness, and their articulations in agreement symmetries and asymmetries in structural phenomena in Arabic. The chapter focuses particularly on the agreement symmetries and asymmetries in noun–adjective phrases, referential pronominals such as demonstratives and clitics at the phrase level, sentence types, and numeric constructions. Major works in Arabic grammar that analyze these symmetries and asymmetries are reviewed and summarized in descriptive terms. Given the applied nature of the book, this chapter is not meant to offer an overview of how these phenomena are approached in syntactic theories or analyses, but it offers the descriptive realities of these phenomena. The chapter concludes with a summary of the specific asymmetrical realities, particularly differential feature mismatch and feature salience, that drive the subsequent chapters.
