Agreementdepends

Agreementdepends is a proposed term in linguistics to describe a class of agreement phenomena in which the morphosyntactic features on a target element are determined by a dependent element elsewhere in the clause, rather than by the syntactic head alone. The notion emphasizes dependency relations between agreement controllers and affected forms and covers cross-linguistic variation and theoretical debates about what counts as a controller.

In practice, agreementdepends manifests in several patterns: possessor-based concord where the possessor controls agreement on a possessed noun; numeral-driven concord where the numeral influences agreement of a following determiner or adjective; long-distance or nonlocal agreement where features are computed from a non-adjacent element such as a topic or focus marker.

In computational linguistics, modelling agreementdepends helps in parsing and generation by allowing constraints to reference nonlocal elements; formalisms that support long-distance dependencies or feature unification can encode such relations.

Criticism includes the ambiguity of identifying the correct controller in languages with opaque morphology, and whether agreementdepends should be analyzed as a synchronic constraint or as a consequence of underlying syntactic structure.

See also: grammatical agreement; syntactic dependency; feature checking; long-distance dependency.