Markedness and Agreement

This paper presents an account of the interpretation of unmarked verb forms in which the entries of unmarked forms are uniformly unspecified for agreement features. The entries of impersonal verbs directly sanction agreement‐neutral syntagmatic structures. However, the entries of unmarked personal verbs sanction structures with negative agreement values, as a consequence of an inflectional blocking principle that preserves paradigmatic contrasts by ‘inferring’ values in the mapping from lexical entries to syntagmatic structures. The interpretation of an unmarked form thus reflects the opposition of marked forms in its paradigm.