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

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(349) a. The river thundered/cascaded its way down the ravine.
b. *The river fell/flowed its way down the ravine.
(350) a. She showed (the students/to the students) [that seven is a prime].
b. She showed [seven to be a prime] to the students.
c. She showed (*the students) [seven to be a prime].
d. She showed (*the students) [there to be a prime in the set].
(see further (274))
Person hierarchy interactions exhibit the same two phenomena. On the one
hand, there is the alternation of agreement and case morphology: absolutive to ergative,
nominative to accusative. On the other, there is the licensing of DPs, for
pronouns banned by the PCC are not salvageable by nonagreement (section 5.2). It
has even been possible to closely parallel the transitivization of unaccusatives due
to the addition of a DP and due to the PCC (section 5.6). Remarkable correspondences
thus exist between the emergence of dependent Agree/Case for general DP
licensing and for [+person] licensing. They are captured by ℜ, through which the
dependent relations are last-resort response to Case licensing failure, (293).
Nevertheless, these observations demand only that ℜ activate Agree/Case loci
in response to Full Interpretation failures, perhaps distinct ones. The assimilation
of [+person] and Case licensing as a single failure seems promising, but it has alternatives.
They bring out the fundamental gap in present understanding: what are
[+person] and Case licensing?
Case started out as a morphological well-formedness requirement on nominal
stems, motivated by Latin where noun stems always come with case markers
(Rouveret and Vergnaud 1980: Appendix). It is an elegant hypothesis, and suggests
other ways to satisfy Case than by syntactic licensing, such as adjacency or
incorporation (cf. Neeleman and Weerman 1999). However, in English nonpronouns
or in Chinook, Case must be reconstrued as an abstract requirement wholly
independent of surface morphology. More problematic is the availability of default
case morphology for DPs in various contexts outside the 'core' domain where
DPs are subject to the Case Filter: apposition, ellipsis, members of coordinate and
modification structures, gapping, and so on as in (351) (Schütze 1997, 2001,
Quinn 2005). These cannot rescue a DP that finds itself outside the reach of the
Agree/Case system in contexts like (350).
(351) a. Me/*I, I like beans.
b. [Her and us] / *[She and we] have been friends for ages.
(Schütze 2001:211, 214)
It seems possible to continue with a hypothesis like Rouveret and Vergnaud's,
but with Case as an abstract requirement on the input of to PF independent of and
irreparable by its language-specific properties like default Case. The same observation
applies to motivations of Case on the LF side, for instance for thetaassignment
or temporal anchoring (Chomsky 1981: 2.3, 1986b: 3.3.3.3.1, 3.4.3;