The representation of third person and its consequences for person-case effects

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.

Cliticization feeds agreement: a view from Quechua

“…In the Porcón subdialect of Cajamarca Quechua, suppression of -shu in 1>2 contexts is obligatory in the present tense, but merely optional in the past tense (Coombs-Lynch et al 2003:147-148 Formulated in this way, it becomes possible to conceive -s(h)u deletion as a way of eliminating an instance of two adjacent feature bundles bearing [+Participant]. This would make -s(h)u deletion understandable as a morphological OCP effect of the sort discussed in Arregi and Nevins (2006) and Nevins (2007). Note that this rule must be ordered after 1 st (sg.)…”

“…The first of them, Person 0 , turns out to exhibit allomorphy which is sometimes sensitive to both arguments of a transitive verb simultaneously, spelling out as a portmanteau in some dialects. I argue that this indicates that Person 0 initiates a Multiple Agree relation in the sense of Hiraiwa (2001Hiraiwa ( , 2004 and Nevins (2007Nevins ( , 2011. 19 The allomorphy of the other two heads, Addressee 0 and Participant 0 , is never sensitive to more than one argument, so I assume that they initiate simple Agree operations only.…”

“…I suggest that this -n is the spell out of a functional head, Person 0 . I assume that Person 0 initiates Multiple Agree in the sense of Hiraiwa (2001Hiraiwa ( , 2004 and Nevins (2007Nevins ( , 2011, potentially agreeing with more than one argument simultaneously (this property will prove to have an important role in accounting for certain aspects of the allomorphy of this head The 2 nd person markers additionally contain a formative -k. I suggest that this -k is the spell-out of a head I will call Addressee 0 . This head has allomorphs -k and -Ø; the first of these is inserted in 2 nd person contexts, the second is the elsewhere form.…”

“…In the approach of Nevins (2007Nevins ( , 2011 35 This means that the two constraints that Nevins (2007Nevins ( , 2011 postulates which all Multiple Agree relations must satisfy 36 will be vacuously satisfied by relations instigated by Person 0 . Note that the statement that Person 0 is seeking values of [+/-Participant] is to be understood as a condition on the sorts of Goals this Probe can Agree with, not as a specification of the features for which it is Valued.…”

Mesoclisis in the imperative: Phonology, morphology or syntax?

“…This constraint, while originally studied within a morphological framework by Bonet (1994) has recently been accounted for in terms of syntactic categories and principles (e.g. Anagnostopoulou, 2003;Bejar and Rezac, 2003;Bianchi, 2006;Adger and Harbour, 2007;Nevins, 2007) the conception of dative proposed in the text could indeed lead to a different view of the constraint -which the literature quoted takes to be based entirely on notions of Person/ animacy.…”