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

263
like invite, which do not. The former operate on the physical aspect or 'qualium' of
their object, in the sense of Pustejovsky (1995); the latter, on humans with mental
states. The former avoid the 1 st /2 nd person restriction by coercion or metonymy of
1 st /2 nd person from the speaker/addressee as such to their physical aspect. For betray
but not invite, coercion is made possible by the 3 rd person impostor in (404).
If this is on the right track, the next question is where the coercion occurs.
Postal (1989) proposes that 1 st /2 nd person used for 3 rd person is 3 rd person in syntax,
so that If I were an integer, you could factor me into primes is (also) If I were
an integer, you could factor this integer into primes. That would work if the 1 st /2 nd
person object of transport but not invite could realize a syntactic structure like
my/your person/body, despite its form as I/you (cf. the structure of impostors in
Collins and Postal 2008). However, for all syntactic purposes save person restriction,
the 1 st /2 nd persons immune to it are ordinary 1 st /2 nd person pronouns.
Instead, qualia and their coercions might reside outside syntax, along the lines
of Pustejovsky (1991, 1995) and Jackendoff (1992, 2002) for such cases as (407)a,
(407)b and (403). The Person Case Constraint would be affected if 1 st /2 nd person
pronouns coerced to, say, their physical qualium, were capable of inserting or projecting
in syntax without [+person]. The features that ensure reference to speaker
and addressee remain and so are independent of [+person]. Thanks to them, the
coerced pronouns otherwise behave and surface ordinarily. Perhaps pertinent is
Chomsky's (2000b) observation that the same expression can be simultaneously
interpreted under different qualia, as in (407)c, (407)d.
(407) a. Elanor enjoyed the book. (the event of reading the book; its content)
b. Elanor weighed the book. (the physical object)
c. Elanor cannot enjoy a book with a red cover.
d. They took every book to weigh it and say if they enjoyed it.
On either approach, tools exist to model the considerable speaker variation for
(402), including the lexical availability of non-[+person] 1 st /2 nd person pronouns
or of their spell-out (cf. variation in the cross-linguistic availability and properties
of impostors, Collins and Postal 2008, and metonymy, Nunberg 1995).
The suspension of [+person] in (402)-(404) is surely revealing about its nature.
It seems compatible with the views of [+person] of Ormazabal and Romero
(2007) where it is animacy, or Laenzlinger (1993), Burston (1983), and Blanche-
Benveniste (1978), which focus on individuation. It goes rather against Boeckx's
(2000) point-of-view, given (405), or Béjar and Rezac's (2003, 2009) discourseparticipant,
given that 1 st /2 nd person morphology and syntax and speaker/addressee
reference all remain, and that 3 rd person animates can be [+person] in (392).
The ways to avoid person restrictions in the mediopassive can also be found
in more canonical PCC contexts in French. The effect of impostors like Madame
has already been discussed for (390), (391), with its parametric variation. Postal
(1989: chapter 5) extends the effects of inanimate interpretation in counterfactual
and dream contexts to the PCC in French causatives in (408) (on which see section