Abstract
In modeling the effects of the Person-Case Constraint (PCC), a common claim is that 3rd person “is not a person”. However, while this claim does work in the syntax, it creates problems in the morphology. For example, characterizing the well-known “spurious se effect” in Spanish simply cannot be done without reference to 3rd person. Inspired by alternatives to underspecification that have emerged in phonology (e.g., Calabrese, 1995), a revised featural system is proposed, whereby syntactic agreement may be relativized to certain values of a feature, in particular, the contrastive and marked values. The range of variation in PCC effects is shown to emerge as a consequence of the parametric options allowed on a Probing head, whereas the representation of person remains constant across modules of the grammar and across languages.
Highlights
In modeling the effects of the Person-Case Constraint (PCC), a common claim is that 3rd person “is not a person”
We have considered an account of the range of crosslinguistic PCC effects that does not rely upon the 3noP view, and contains full specification of features for all clitics/pronouns, yet allows for flexibility and variation in the functional heads that control agreement, which may bear varying degrees of parametrization as to the values they will allow in Multiple Agree scenarios when there are two arguments within the domain
We have seen that the features [±Author] and [±Participant] are more successful in generating the typology of PCC effects than alternatives which include the binary feature [±Hearer]
Summary
Spanish has a system of pronominal clitics that may be marked for case, person, number, and gender. The dissimilation rule falls into line with a number of formally identical rules in natural language, such as those identified by the Obligatory Contour Principle (Leben, 1973), the Double-ing filter (Ross, 1972), and, most importantly, the set of clitic constraints given by Perlmutter (1971:44) for Spanish that generally ban adjacent person specifications in a clitic cluster (recall that dative and accusative are syncretic for 1st & 2nd person in Spanish, and note that nos is the 1st plural clitic):. The evidence comes from work by Arregi and Nevins (2006), who investigate a pattern of unexpected agreement morphology in dialects of Bizkaian Basque, which they call the g-/z- constraint These dialects ban agreement morphology that realizes a 1st-plural argument when a 2nd person argument is present, and repair the configuration by deleting person features on either the 1pl or the 2nd person argument.
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