The anaphor agreement effect (AAE) is the crosslinguistic inability for anaphors to covary with ϕ-agreement (Rizzi 1990, Woolford 1999); languages use various strategies that conspire to circumvent this effect. In this squib, I identify and confirm a prediction arising from two previous observations by Woolford (1999) concerning the scope of the AAE, based on new evidence from Inuktitut (Eastern Canadian Inuit). I propose that anaphors in Inuktitut are lexically specified as projecting additional syntactic structure, spelled out as oblique case morphology; because ϕ-Agree in Inuktitut may only target ERG and ABS arguments, encountering an anaphor inevitably leads to failed Agree in the sense of Preminger 2011, 2014. I moreover argue that this exact AAE pattern is previously unattested, yet is predicted to arise given the range of existing strategies. Finally, this squib provides evidence against previous detransitivization-based approaches to reflexivity in Inuktitut (e.g., Bok-Bennema 1991).

Much recent literature has focused on whether the verbal agreement morphology cross-referencing objects is true φ-agreement or clitic doubling. I address this question on the basis of comparative data from related Inuit languages, Inuktitut and Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic), and argue that both possibilities are attested in Inuit. Evidence for this claim comes from diverging syntactic and semantic properties of the object DPs encoded by this cross-referencing morphology. I demonstrate that object DPs in Inuktitut display various properties mirroring the behavior of clitic-doubled objects crosslinguistically, while their counterparts in Kalaallisut display none of these properties, indicating genuine φ-agreement rather than clitic doubling. Crucially, this distinction cannot be detected morphologically, as the relevant cross-referencing morphemes are uniform across Inuit. Therefore, this article cautions against the reliability of canonical morphological diagnostics for (agreement) affixes vs. clitics.