Agreement in Ibibio: From Every Head to Every Head

Abstract.  The Ibibio language has the special property that agreement with a single grammatical subject can appear multiple times in the same clause. After showing that this is a general phenomenon in the language, we argue that every verbal functional head in Ibibio—Aspect, Auxiliary, Mood, and Participle, as well as Tense—acts as a probe, capable of initiating an Agree relationship. Furthermore, a close comparison of agreement in indicative, subjunctive, negative, and infinitival clauses shows that these functional heads do not agree with the subject directly; rather each agrees with the next highest functional head within the extended projection. The facts of Ibibio thus point toward a version of Chomsky’s theory of Agree in which any functional head can be the probe in an agreement relation, and any functional head can be the goal in such a relation.