ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of the key concepts in the sub sequent chapters of this book. The book describes the advantages of feature-merging over feature-copying accounts of agreement. The feature-merging analysis is based on unification, but the core idea is simply that nominal morphology is distributed throughout a sentence. The book contains a cross-linguistic survey of the information encoded in nominal morphology. It is demonstrated that in numerous cases, information about the properties of referents resides in the nominal itself, and also in agreement markers found on adjectives and verbs. The book examines the information structures relevant for agreement. It consists of a discussion of the eight properties of agreement, and an evaluation of the potential of syntactic and semantic accounts of agreement for handling each property. The book presents the Discourse-Linking Theory of agreement and argues that the inadequacy of the syntactic and semantic accounts of agreement arises from the lack of relevant information.
