<P>In this book, Omer Preminger investigates how the obligatory nature ofpredicate-argument agreement is enforced by the grammar. Preminger argues that an empiricallyadequate theory of predicate-argument agreement requires recourse to an operation, whoseobligatoriness is a grammatical primitive not reducible to representational properties, but whosesuccessful culmination is not enforced by the grammar. </P><P>Preminger's argumentcounters contemporary approaches that find the obligatoriness of predicate-argument agreementenforced through representational means. The most prominent of these is Chomsky's"interpretability"-based proposal, in which the obligatoriness of predicate-argumentagreement is enforced through derivational time bombs. Preminger presents an empirical argumentagainst contemporary approaches that seek to derive the obligatory nature of predicate-argumentagreement exclusively from <I>derivational time bombs</I>. He offers instead analternative account based on the notion of <I>obligatory operations </I>better suited tothe facts. The crucial data involves utterances that inescapably involve attempted-but-failedagreement and are nonetheless fully grammatical. Preminger combines a detailed empiricalinvestigation of agreement phenomena in the Kichean (Mayan) languages, Zulu (Bantu), Basque,Icelandic, and French with an extensive and rigorous theoretical exploration of the far-reachingconsequences of these data. The result is a novel proposal that has profound implications for theformalism that the theory of grammar uses to derive obligatory processes and properties. </P>