1 Where’s Φ? Agreement as a post-syntactic operation*

Abstract. This paper develops an argument that agreement between a predicate and its arguments is part of the component that interprets syntactic structure (Morphology) and is not, as commonly held, a part of the component that generates syntactic structure (narrow syntax). The key argument is from the order of operations in the derivation. Accessibility for agreement is arguably universally dependent on the outcome of a phenomenon that is independently shown to be post-syntactic, namely, the rules of morphological (as opposed to “abstract”) case assignment. Independent evidence for divorcing agreement from structural licensing (the domain of Case Theory of the LGB framework) comes from constructions where agreement obtains with NPs that have no independent syntactic relationship to the agreeing predicate