Grammatical agreement (such as the subject-verb agreement in 'She sings' versus 'I sing') is one of the most pervasive yet puzzling aspects of natural language. From a logical perspective, such agreement appears to be redundant, and yet most known languages have some form of agreement, many far more complex than what is found in English or other Indo-European languages. Recent advances in Morphology (the study of form) and Semantics (the study of meaning) have shed light on aspects of the phenomenon, though work in the two areas has been largely independent and the results from each area appear in some instances to stand in conflict. This project, in a collaboration between research teams at the University of Connecticut and the Center for General Linguistics (ZAS), Berlin, Germany, brings together researchers from both discipline areas, with the aim of resolving these apparent conflicts and making progress towards a coherent theory. One specific aim is to extend the coverage of issues at the frontier of the two disciplines to a variety of lesser-studied languages through the creation of a cross-linguistic database.
