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Dissociating the Person Case Constraint from its “repair”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2019

Tomohiro Yokoyama
Tomohiro Yokoyama*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

In French ditransitive sentences, certain person combinations of the two internal arguments cannot be expressed with two co-occurring clitics (a phenomenon referred to as the Person Case Constraint or PCC). To fill the interpretational gap created by this restriction, there is an alternative construction characterized as a “repair”, where the goal is realized as an independent phrase. The fact that the double-clitic construction and the repair construction are in complementary distribution led to a proposal of an interface algorithm that provides a way to repair a non-convergent structure. This article proposes an alternative account of the PCC, and claims that the complementarity between the PCC and its repair is instead accidental and is an artefact of the feature structure of arguments. The proposed account explains the unavailability of certain clitic combinations and some repairs independently, without resorting to a trans-derivational device like the previously proposed algorithm.

Résumé

Dans les phrases ditransitives en français, certaines combinaisons de personne dans les deux arguments internes ne peuvent pas être exprimées avec deux clitiques concomitants (un phénomène nommé la “Person Case Constraint” ou PCC). Pour combler la lacune interprétive créée par cette restriction, il existe une construction alternative désignée “réparation”, dans laquelle l'objet indirect est réalisé par un syntagme nominal indépendant. Le fait que la construction à deux clitiques et la construction de réparation soient en distribution complémentaire a mené à la proposition d'un algorithme d'interface, qui offre un moyen de réparer une structure non convergente. Cet article propose un autre analyse de la PCC et affirme que la complémentarité entre la PCC et sa réparation est plutôt accidentelle, découlant de la configuration des traits des arguments. La proposition explique, de manière indépendante, l'indisponibilité de certaines combinaisons de clitiques et de certaines réparations, sans recourir à un mécanisme trans-derivationnel comme l'algorithme proposé précédemment.

Keywords

Person Case Constraint (PCC)PCC repairfeaturesvaluationMergeContrainte de cas et de personne (PCC)réparation PCCtraitsattribution de valeurMerge
Type
Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 64 , Issue 4 , December 2019 , pp. 730 - 752
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association/Association canadienne de linguistique 2019 

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Footnotes

I would like to thank the audience at the Manitoba Workshop on Person and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions, as well as the organizers/editors for their work in putting this thematic issue together.

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