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

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3 Person hierarchy interactions in syntax
3.1 Person hierarchies and person interactions
In a strong modular architecture like the Y/T-model, a syntactic phenomenon is
expected to exhibit the modular signature in (84):
(84) Syntactic signature in a modular architecture:
a. Interaction: potentially visible to syntax and to interpretation.
b. Information: syntactic but not phonological or purely morphological
information (such as declension class).
c. Computation: mechanisms over phrase-structurally unbounded domains,
sensitive to c-command, syntactic islands, but not adjacency, etc.
This signature is used to argue for the syntactic status of certain instances of
phi-agreement, in the sense of chapter 1: of the form or position of an element
governed by the phi-features of another. The phi-agreement phenomena concerned
are those where arguments interact according to their person values, or person hierarchy
(PH) interactions. In the present chapter, the argument is developed from
cross-linguistic PH interactions between the transitive subject EA and object O
(DeLancey 1981: 641ff., Jelinek and Demers 1983, Silverstein 1986, Klaiman
1992, Jelinek 1993, Arnold 1997, Aissen 1997, Nichols 2001, Trommer 2001, Zuñiga
2002, Béjar 2003, Béjar and Rezac 2009, Georgi 2009). The next chapter
continues in the same vein with a more sustained argument for the syntactic status
of the PH interaction between the direct and indirect object in the Person Case
Constraint of French. 27
In systems with PH interaction, agreement, case, and certain other properties
of EA and O depend on the other's person specifications, rather than on the individual
properties of each. Such agreement and case that refers to the properties of
another argument has been called 'global', in contrast to 'local' (Silverstein 1986:
178f., Georgi 2009). In the following Ojibwa example, the agreement prefix is
controlled by 1 st person as n- whether it is the EA acting on a 3 rd person O,
1EA→3O, or the O being acted on by a 3 rd person EA, 3EA→1O. When a 2 nd person
EA/O is present, control of the prefix falls to it as g-, both in 1EA→2O and
2EA→1O. Thus neither EA nor O nor 1 st person control the prefix. Rather, the
highest of EA/O on the scale 2 > 1 > 3 person does.
27 The term O is intended to the lower agreement controller in the agreement domain of EA,
rather than its thematic co-argument, and so includes the embedded subject of cross-clausal
agreement and raising-to-object (as in Algonquian below, or Picurís, Nichols 2001: 523, 531).