Our work on this topic began in connection with our participation in the AHRC project “Noun Phrase Agreement and Coordination”, a joint project which involved, besides us, Louisa Sadler, Ryo Otoguro, and Aline Villavicencio at the University of Essex (AHRC grant MRG-AN10939/APN17606, 2004–2006). We are grateful to Louisa, Ryo, and Aline for helpful comments and discussion as our ideas developed over the course of the project.

Earlier versions of the work were presented at the 2005 International Lexical Functional Grammar Conference (LFG05) in Bergen, the 2005 Linguistic Association of Great Britain conference in Cambridge, the 2005 Colloque de Syntaxe et Sémantique à Paris (CSSP 2005), the University of Leipzig in December 2007, the University of Manchester in April 2008, the workshop “Arctic Languages: Syntax, Morphology, Lexicon” at the University of Tromsø in September 2009, the workshop “Variation and Change in Argument Realisation” at the University of Naples in May 2010, the Surrey Linguistics Circle in December 2010, and the State of the Art Seminar on Differential Object Marking and Information Structure at the University of Konstanz in December 2010. An early version of our work appeared as Dalrymple and Nikolaeva (2005), though it will be clear to readers of that paper that our ideas have evolved considerably since its publication. We have profited from discussion of these earlier versions with Farrell Ackerman, Ash Asudeh, David Beck, Balthasar Bickel, Miriam Butt, Elizabeth Coppock, Greville Corbett, David Cram, Annahita Farudi, Ron Kaplan, Tracy Holloway King, Aditi Lahiri, Olivia Lam, Louise Mycock, Tara Mohanan, Louisa Sadler, Devyani Sharma, Nigel Vincent, Yogendra Yadava, and Annie Zaenen.