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

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This 'ergativization' is limited to PCC contexts. Nowhere else can the core argument
S of unaccusatives be ergative: in plain unaccusatives, in ones with an
agreeing prepositional dative or a nonagreeing PP, in ones with an applicative dative
and 3 rd person S. In many of the varieties with this repair, morphological gaps
riddle or entirely suppress the agreement paradigm of 1/2.ABS + DAT even for
verbs with prepositional datives, hurbildu in (261). The repair remains unavailable
for these gaps. It is keyed to the PCC, just like the French one in section 4.6.
Table 5.1 illustrates two minimal 'reflections' of the Basque repair through the
mirrors of independent parameters. In the nominative-accusative system of Finnish,
the accusative is found in transitives but not unaccusatives, corresponding in
this sense to the Basque ergative as 'dependent' Case (section 5.5). Accusative is
what the PCC repair recruits in Finnish. Chinook is ergative-absolutive, but it is a
'primary object' language where the applicative argument is a plain absolutive DP
rather than a dative. Therefore, the applicative argument ergativizes. All three languages
treat unaccusatives fundamentally in the same way. The PCC in unaccusatives
is repaired by the recruitment of the extra Agree/Case relation of transitives.
In chapter 3 have been seen similar responses to person constraints, including Arizona
Tewa and Yurok in Table 5.1; section 5.9 returns to this parallel.
Transitives cannot use this repair, because they already use the ergative/accusative
Agree/Case relation, and there is only one per CP in the linguistic
systems at hand. The PCC repair observes this restriction and does not introduce a
second ergative or accusative. Yet the repair that does occur can be seen as an instance
of the same pattern. To add an Agree/Case relation to an unaccusative, it is
turned into a transitive. To add one to a transitive, an incomplete dative PP or a
plain DP is enriched with an Agree/Case system to give a full PP or a its DP analogue.
This occurs in French, Basque, or Georgian (sections 5.7-8).
Thus the repairs have a unity and a conservativity to them: the addition of an
Agree/Case relation that is otherwise absent in a structure, but compatible with its
independent capacity. It may be cast into relief by considering the alternative ways
the repairs might have been. When the repair in French turns PPDAT into a full PP,
it takes the dative to the closest full PP, a locative or nearly so. It might have instead
recruited a different lexical preposition or a different syntactic structure. Instead
of She presented you.DAT me.ACC might have appeared She presented
you.ACC with me, She presented me.ACC for you, She made my introduction to
you, She had me introduced to you. Farther would be repairs using impossible
structures, for instance two ergatives in a CP. The tools to code such repairs exist
if selection could refer to PCC contexts, or if arbitrary syntax-semantics mappings
or 'constructions' are permitted. Yet that is not what the repairs look like. From
this perspective they are strikingly homogeneous and conservative, for all their
surface diversity. They modify a structure by minimally increasing its Agree/Case
capacity in a way compatible with the syntax of the language, and other content is
unchanged. This character of the repairs is the present point of departure.