Typologists have maintained that grammatical agreement systems evolve historically from the morphological incorporation of pronouns into verbs or nominal heads, and it has also been claimed that there is no clear dividing line between grammatical agreement, such as subject-verb agreement, and incorp-orated pronominal anaphora to a topic. Current theories of formal grammatical structure provide little insight into the nature of grammatical and anaphoric agreement, why they are so closely related, and what significant differences there are between them. As we will show in this study, there is substantial synchronic
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evidence of the close relation between grammatical and anaphoric agreement even within the grammatical structures of a single language. But, as we will also show, it is possible to predict clear syntactic differences between a grammatical agreement marker and a morphologically incorporated anaphoric pronoun. What is required is a theory of grammatical functions that integrates the properties of argument functions, such as subject and object, and discourse functions such as topic and focus. This study is a step toward developing such a theory within the overall framework of the lexical-functional theory of grammar.