The emergence of internal agreement systems

Grammatical agreement means that two linguistic units share certain syntactic or semantic features such as gender, number or person. Agreement has a variety of grammatical functions. One of them, called internal agreement, is to signal which words are grouped together as part of the same phrase. This chapter explores how a population might self-organize such an agreement system. We argue that this happens when speakers attempt to reduce processing effort and avoid ambiguities.This research was conducted at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, financed by a strategic basic research grant (IWT-489) from the agency for Innovation by Science and Technology (IWT), and at the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris. Additional funding came from the European research project ALEAR (FP7, ICT-214856).Peer Reviewe