Why can't we all just agree?: animacy and the person case constraint

Abstract

Many typologically diverse languages exhibit a restriction on the objects of a ditransitive verb: in the presence of indirect object agreement, direct object agreement may not be 1st or 2nd person (Bonet 1991; Albizu 1997) or 3rd person animate (Ormazabal and Romero 2002). This restriction is known as the Person Case Constraint (PCC). In this thesis, I assume that the PCC effects derive from general grammatical principles that conspire to produce the observed restrictions. My analysis rests on four claims: 1) the person/number/gender features of both objects are encoded only in verb agreement, while the objects themselves are featurally-deficient pro's; 2) these pro's receive their interpretation by having the agreement features copied onto them; 3) the copying procedure for both null object is moderated by a single functional head; and 4) if both agreement feature sets are specified for the feature [Sentient], the resulting ambiguity will disable the copying mechanism.