Common use of Defining Agreement Clause in Contracts

Defining Agreement. The first challenge that any linguist dealing with agreement has to face is defining it. Agreement is a multifaceted phenomenon, it operates at the interface of morphology and syntax, and, as we will see later, it is also influenced by semantics and pragmatics. Hence, there exist plenty of definitions and alternative notions of agreement tailored for specific purposes of a given theory. Some of the terminological and definitional complexities are discussed in ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇’▇ Agreement (2006). I will adopt his account here. The broad definition of agreement is as follows: The term agreement commonly refers to some systematic covariance between a semantic or formal property of one element and a formal property of another. (▇▇▇▇▇▇ 1978:610, as cited in ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ 2006:4) In order to describe agreement in a uniform and concise manner it is necessary to introduce the following essential notions: the controller, the element determining the agreement, the target, whose form is determined by agreement, and the domain, the syntactic environment in which agreement occurs (ibid.). A target agrees with a controller with regard to its feature specifications within a given domain (ibid.:5). Consider [1]:2 [1] ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇-▇.▇▇ lady(F)-SG ‘a beautiful lady’ In [1] the domain of agreement is a noun phrase. The controller is the singular feminine noun девушка ‘lady’, and the target is the adjective красивая ‘beautiful’. The features inherent to the controller, i.e. number and gender, are reflected in agreement and expressed on the target by the inflectional suffix -ая.3 It is important to note that the relation between the controller 2 The examples in this thesis are glossed according to the Leipzig Glossing Rules. Here and henceforth the most important parts of the gloss are in bold.