{"pk":48662,"title":"Current models of Agree","subtitle":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper is an opinionated survey of issues and perspectives in current models of Agree, understood as a single abstract grammatical operation common to all syntactic long-distance dependencies. I begin with a brief introduction to Chomsky's 2000, 2001 foundational work on Agree. I then review three strands of literature that have in notable ways chipped away at the conceptual foundations of that work in the course of improving the cross-linguistic empirical adequacy of the theory. These center on valuation and relativized probing, in section 3; defaults and failure to value, in section 4; and the question of whether goals must be made “active” by uninterpretable features, in section 5. In section 6, I review an ongoing debate about the directionality of Agree in light of the issues raised for uninterpretable features in sections 3-5. The paper concludes with a presentation of what I see as a way forward for the theory of Agree: the interaction/satisfaction theory, which provides a new conceptual grounding for Agree that in various respects makes sense of the empirical landscape uncovered by the past two decades of intensive research on this topic.</p>","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Syntactic theory"},{"word":"Syntax"},{"word":"generative grammar"},{"word":"minimalism"},{"word":"dependency"},{"word":"feature theory"},{"word":"interaction/satisfaction"},{"word":"agreement"}],"section":"Articles","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9g76n758","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Amy Rose","middle_name":"","last_name":"Deal","name_suffix":"","institution":"UC Berkeley","department":"Linguistics"}],"date_submitted":"2025-06-17T21:06:28.581000Z","date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2025-07-10T11:11:00Z","render_galley":{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/bling_formal_linguistics/article/48662/galley/36675/download/"},"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/bling_formal_linguistics/article/48662/galley/36675/download/"}]}