Post Verbal Subjects and Agreement in Brazilian Portuguese

If the possibility of singular agreement in variant agreement were to be
attributed to a switch by speakers to the no-agreement dialect, the variant agreement
pattern would not be expected to be restricted as described in section 3.
5.2. Agree
Thus, the variant agreement pattern should not be attributed to diglossia.
This section will provide a brief preliminary comment on some issues related to
accounting for the BP data discussed here assuming Chomsky’s (2000, 2001)
theory of agreement.
Chomsky (2000, 2001) proposes that agreement is the result of the operation
Agree, which establishes a relation of agreement between an active probe (e.g. T)
and an active goal (e.g. the subject DP), checking uninterpretable features of the
probe or the goal. The probe agrees with the closet active matching goal that it c-
commands, with no requirement for a spec-head configuration. Raising of the
subject to spec-TP is driven by requirements other than agreement, such as the EPP.
Another way to satisfy the EPP is expletive insertion. In Chomsky’s approach, the
expletive in existential constructions is inserted directly in spec-TP (not raised from
a lower position). 32
32 This description of Chomsky’s approach is a summary of some of the main ideas which omits a lot
of the details in the implementation. As well as the main ideas described in the text, the following
constraints are proposed in Chomsky’s account of existentials:
(i) α must have a complete set of φ-features to delete uninterpretable features of the
paired matching element β.
42