Phi-features and the Modular Architecture of - UMR 7023 - CNRS

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(215) Je lui ferai parvenir votre lettre.
I him.D will.make reach your letter
I will make your letter reach him.
(Tasmowski 1985: 281)
(216) Que faire pour amadouer le patron? Lui écrire? Lui faire téléphoner?
Mais par qui? Moi, je lui ferais téléphoner MARIE. Elle est fine, elle le
connaît bien, elle saura quoi lui dire.
What to do to soften the boss's heart? Write to him? Make someone
phone him? But who? I would get MARY to phone him.D (lui). She is
subtle, she knows him well, she'll know what to tell him.
(Tasmowski 1985: 360; my emphasis)
This observation might be integrated into a syntactic account by supposing that
the narrowly focussed subject of (216) undergoes A'-movement and thereby no
longer counts as a Specified Subject, or that the narrow focus reading coerces the
verb into an unaccusative-like structure. Instead, Tasmowski proposes that the
problem in causativizing unergatives is pragmatic. A conflict arises because both
the dative clitic and the agent-causee want to be identified as the topic. There is no
conflict if the clitic is not dative, (214), or the causee not an agent, (215), and it is
resolved if the causee-agent is the focus rather than the topic, (216). 97
The options seem open. On syntactic accounts, causatives are an environment
where the absence of a cliticization site and a clitic climbing failure cannot suspend
the Cliticization Requirement, unlike the PCC. On pragmatic accounts, the
PCC repair cannot respond to an extrasyntactic problem in interpretation, analogous
to morphological clitic cluster problems in realization. Another such
interpretive problem has already been seen: Condition B in section 4.4.
4.6.8 The weak PCC
There may be an argument for the specificity of the PCC repair that inverses
the logic hitherto: the repair 'overapplies' on clitic clusters that should fall under
the PCC but do not. Bonet (1991: 4.1.1) observes that some Romance varieties
tolerate 1/2.ACC + 2/1.DAT clitic clusters while still barring 1/2.ACC + 3.DAT.
She names this the weak PCC, in contrast to the strong PCC that rules out all
survivre 'survive' (Kayne 1975: 252ff., Tasmowski 1985, Rooryck 1988b, Legendre 1989b: 146,
Landau 2010: 3.7, Folli and Harley 2007: 213).
97 Tasmowski's proposal has far greater scope than the causativization of unergatives, including
cliticization failure in transitives due to the Specified Subject Condition, and the PCC created by
dative causees in section 4.5. For the PCC, it fails for various reasons, such as the contrast between
the PCC 1/2.ACC 3.DAT clusters and good 1/2.DAT 3.DAT clusters (Postal 1981, 1983,
1984, 1990; cf. Tasmowski 1985: 362 note 7), and the non-cancellability of the PCC by dative àphrase
through manipulating information structure in the manner of (216), shown in (177). Similarly
the Specified Subject Condition cliticization failure in transitives like (174) seems precisely
inverse to the effect predicted for locative clitics, Tasmowski (1985: 356-61).