Abstract
An attempt to determine some of the requirements of that portion of linguistic theory concerned with agreement. Within Slavonic there are numerous difficulties, which may be classified into three types, according to whether they are caused by the controller, the target, or the agreement features. There are difficulties in identifying the controller, in establishing its features, & in handling reluctant controllers (which do not appear in surface structure in a form that matches that of the target). The major target problems involve compound targets & reluctant targets. Features require resolution rules & rules to assign default values. Various constructions discussed permit agreement choices, whose distribution is determined by a range of linguistic & sociolinguistic factors. Patterns can be established for the use of agreement options, but some of these must be stated at corpus level rather than at sentence level. The conclusion is that even within a closely related & relatively conservative set of IE langs there are several constructions that are problematic for linguistic theory. 2 Tables, 43 References. HA