Grammatical structures connect systems of thought and articulation, the conditions of which hardly seem to fit each other. Repairs are productive mechanisms that solve translation problems between modules or levels by adapting derivations or representations to requirements that have to be met unconditionally. Compensating for derivational and interpretive defects, repairs determine core properties of natural language grammars and their interfaces.

This series publishes original contributions which describe and theoretically analyze structures of natural languages. The main focus is on principles and rules of grammatical and lexical knowledge both with respect to individual languages and from a comparative perspective. The volumes cover all levels of linguistic analysis, especially phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, including aspects of language acquisition, language use, language change, and phonetical and neuronal realization.

This book brings together new work by leading syntactic theorists from the USA and Europe on a central aspect of syntactic and morphological theory: it explores the role of agreement morphology in the morphosyntactic realization of a verb's arguments. The authors examine the differences and parallels between nonconfigurational, pronominal- agreement languages; configurational languages which allow pronoun drop (for example, "Is coming" for "He is coming"); languages that allow pronoun drop in particular constructions only; and languages which always require overt syntactic determiner phrases as arguments. The book considers whether the morphological properties of agreement play a role in determining which of these types a language belongs to and how far languages differ with respect to the argumental status of their agreement and syntactic determiner phrases. The authors explore these and related issues and problems in the context of a wide range of languages. Their book will interest linguists at graduate level and above concerned with morphosyntactic theory, linguistic typology, and the interactions of syntax and morphology in different languages.