The Object Agreement Constraint
Javier Ormazabal2007, Natural Language & Linguistic Theory
Sign up for access to the world's latest research
Abstract
This paper is an extensively revised and expanded version of the first part of a broader paper that was circulated as and also included a syntactic analysis of the agreement restrictions discussed here. The syntactic proposal analyzed the properties of a series of ditransitive constructions that were shown to be subject to the restriction: dative Constructions, dative Clitic Constructions and Double Object Constructions, all in a broad variety of languages. Due to editorial requirements, we have extended the descriptive sections of the work, leaving the more theoreticallyoriented parts of our proposal for a forthcoming paper. Parts of this material were presented at the Universities of the Basque Country, British Columbia, Connecticut, Melbourne, MIT, Paris 8-Saint Denis, the Linguistic Seminar at Deusto, the 21 st GLOW Colloquium at Tilburg, and the Journées d´Études Linguistiques de Nantes, JEL 2004. We are very grateful to these audiences for helpful comments and discussion. We are also thankful to Abstract This paper deals with the so-called Person Case Constraint (Bonet 1991), a universal constraint blocking accusative clitics and object agreement morphemes other than third person when a dative is inserted in the same clitic/agreement cluster. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we argue that the scope of the PCC is considerably broader than assumed in previous work, and that neither its formulation in terms of person (1 st /2 nd vs. 3 rd )-case (accusative vs. dative) restrictions nor its morphological nature are part of the right descriptive generalization. We present evidence (i) that the PCC is triggered by the presence of an animacy feature in the object's agreement set; (ii) that it is not case dependent, also showing up in languages that lack dative case; and (iii) that it is not morphologically bound. Second, we argue that the PCC, even if it is modified accordingly, still puts together two different properties of the agreement system that should be set apart: (i) a cross-linguistic sensitivity of object agreement to animacy and (ii) a similarly widespread restriction on multiple object agreement observed crosslinguistically. These properties lead us to propose a new generalization, the Object Agreement Constraint (OAC): if the verbal complex encodes object agreement, no other 1 For reasons that will become clear in the discussion, we will use the same notation for clitics and agreement markers in the glosses. We will use the following abbreviations: CL=clitic, ACC=accusative,
