Features, agreement, and structure of the Russian noun phrase

The paper discusses the hierarchical structure of the Russian noun phrase in light of agreement phenomena. It is shown that the featural matrix of the Russian DP is not necessarily the same at different stages of syntactic derivation, and these discrepancies yield various mismatches in agreement patterns, including lack of agreement with the predicate as well as breakdown of agreement within a DP. A crucial characteristic of these mismatches is that they do not vary randomly but obey implicational laws derived from the hierarchical structure of the noun phrase.