Agreement, Government, Congruence

Rigorous definitions are proposed for three important syntactic-morphological concepts: agreement, government and congruence. They are defined as particular cases of morphological dependency between wordforms of an utterance (distinguished from semantic and syntactic dependencies between wordforms). Definitions are based on the intermediate concepts of agreement class and related inflectional categories, as well as on the concepts of inflectional category, grammeme, syntactics feature and syntactics feature value. AGREEMENT is defined (roughly speaking) as a morphological dependency where a grammeme of the target, which is not a substitute pronoun, is selected depending either 1) upon a grammeme of a related category of the controller, or 2) upon its agreement class, pronominal person or pronominal number (syntactics features), or else 3) upon some of its semantic properties. GOVERNMENT is defined as a morphological dependency where a grammeme of the target is selected depending either 1) upon a grammeme of an unrelated category of the controller or 2) upon one of its syntactics features, which is not agreement class, pronominal person or pronominal number. CONGRUENCE is defined as a morphological dependency where a grammeme of the target, which is a substitute pronoun replacing an occurrence of the controller, is selected depending upon any property of the controller. Numerous examples of agreement, government and congruence are cited and analyzed, a comparison of agreement and government is presented, and relationships between these concepts and other types of dependencies are examined.