Long distance agreement and information structure

In this paper, I discuss a specific subtype of long distance agreement (LDA), namely
agreement across a finite (CP) clause boundary. I show that most, if not all, in-
stances of LDA depend on information-structural properties of the agreement tar-
get in the embedded clause, be it for cross clausal object agreement or case assign-
ment. After discussing LDA in unrelated language families, I argue that LDA is pos-
sible due to a complex probe in the left periphery containing information-structural
features bundled with φ-features. This probe serves as an intermediate agreement
step between a verb in the matrix clause and the information-structurally marked
element in the embedded clause, so that LDA does not violate the phase impene-
trability condition.