Gender agreement is different

Person and gender are typical agreement features within the clause, and crosslinguistically they are frequently part of one and the same agreement system and even expressed through the same morphological exponents. Some theories even go so far as to claim that person and gender agreement on different targets, e.g., verbs and adjectives, are instances of one and the same agreement phenomenon. This paper discusses gender and person agreement in the Nakh-Daghestanian language Lak. It shows that the two agreement systems are formally and functionally completely separated from each other. Corpus data from Lak does not prove that gender agreement in this language is used to establish reference. Therefore it should rather be treated as concord, that is, similar to modifier agreement within the noun phrase.