ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the relation between a morpholexical analysis of strings and discourse referents. In addition, the mapping m between strings and the three components of discourse referents - properties and discourse status (DS) and Saliency Hierarchy (SH) indices - was spelled out. The chapter covers the application of Discourse-Linking Theory (DLT) to the eight properties of agreement. It shows that DLT solves a considerable number of the problems that have plagued syntactic and semantic accounts of agreement and, moreover, provides a natural analysis of phenomena ignored by many previous accounts, e.g., missing sources and the Agreement Hierarchy. Previous accounts of agreement have been rather limited in their scope; DLT offers the possibility of covering a much wider range of agreement phenomena than previous theories. It was also shown that discourse provides a natural setting for an account of agreement phenomena. The chapter also discusses some of the consequences and predictions of DLT.
