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

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5.2 The Person Case Constraint
5.2.1 The Agree/Case approach
Chapter 4 examined the Person Case Constraint (PCC) and its repair in French.
Departing from those results, this section introduces the constraint crosslinguistically
and the Agree/Case theory of it. The next section turns to the repairs.
The PCC and its repair in French are illustrated in (118). Unfocussed pronouns
must cliticize if they are accusative DPs or in defective dative PPDATs,
unlike if they are in full PPs such as locative PPLOCs. The PCC bars
1 st /2 nd /reflexive accusative clitic if a dative intervenes between v and the direct object.
Such dative interveners are applicative datives and dative clitics, either basegenerated
in this position, or moving through it. The PCC repair turns the defective
dative PPDAT into a full PP that is virtually identical to the locative PPLOC, up
to cliticizing as a locative clitic in some varieties (notated ¥ ). The full PP of the repair
has the syntactic properties of other full PPs.
(240) a. Lucille la/*nous leur présentera
b. *Lucille *la/√nous présentera à elles
c. ¥ *Lucille *la/√nous y présentera
Lucille her/us.A them.D/LOC will.introduce to them
Lucille will introduce her/us to them.
(French, chapter 4)
The PCC and its repairs have long been known for Romance (Perlmutter
1971, who compares Warlpiri), and individually for other languages such as
Basque (Lafon 1980) and Georgian (Boeder 1968). It is the spectacular discovery
of Bonet (1991) and the work that followed hers that there a common constraint
and dedicated repairs shared by languages of diverse character and affiliation:
Shambala, Yimas, Warlpiri, Kambera, Ojibwa, and Mapudungun join French,
Warlpiri, Basque, and Georgian in a long list (Albizu 1997ab, Haspelmath 2004).
The PCC and its repairs are good candidates for reflexes of universal principles.
The theory of the PCC adopted here may be called the Agree/Case approach.
It seeks to subsume the PCC under locality on the system of phi-Agree and Case
licensing in Chomsky (2000a), or the Agree/Case system (section 5.4). An
Agree/Case locus, such as vACC, possesses uninterpretable phi-features, the probe.
The probe seeks to establish a syntactic dependency, Agree, with matching interpretable
phi-features, the goal. The interpretable phi-features of the goal, in turn,
need themselves to be licensed by Agree, through Case assigned by the probe.
Agree is subject to conditions, including locality that limits the probe to the closest
matching goal. The leading idea of the Agree/Case approach to the PCC is that an
applicative dative blocks Agree for [+person] φ-feature(s), leading to a Caselicensing
failure (242)-(243). [+person] is borne in French by 1 st /2 nd and by the
special 3 rd person reflexive se, but not by 3 rd person accusatives; cross-linguistic
variation on this matter, in (243), is discussed in chapter 6.