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This monograph investigates the modular architecture of language through the nature of 'uninterpretable' phi-features: person, number, gender, and Case. It provides new tools and evidence for the modular architecture of the human language faculty, a foundational topic of linguistic research. At the same time it develops a new theory for one of the core issues posed by the Minimalist Program: the relationship of syntax to its interfaces and the nature of uninterpretable features. The work sets out to establish a new cross-linguistic phenomenon to study the foregoing, person-governed last-resort.

Abstract.This paper argues for an implementation of cyclicity through a natural economy condition, the Earliness Principle (EP), which requires a feature to be eliminated as early as possible. EP predicts that the search space for feature checking should increase throughout the derivation with the growth of the phrase marker. This prediction is shown to be manifested in "agreement displacement," where agreement morphology under certain conditions cross‐references a noncanonical argument. Agreement displacement shows that (ϕ‐features of a head may seek a DP outside the complement of that head, after the cycle on which search exhausts the complement, as predicted by EP. A detailed look at Basque ergative displacement, which differentially affects person and number, leads to the conclusion that agreement may happen only once per interpretable feature. The blocking of multiple Agree relationships is implemented as a locality effect, based on the construal of Case as a functional category introduced by Agree.