Amy Rose Deal

Amy Rose Deal will speak at the UC San Diego Linguistics Department on Monday April 14th at 2:00 p.m. in AP&M 4301.

On ditransitive person restrictions in primary object languages

Abstract: When a ditransitive is expressed with clitic pronouns or agreement for both objects, oftentimes restrictions are in place on the objects' (relative) person. A typical pattern is that the theme object must be 3rd person. This pattern has been the subject of intensive study by syntacticians over the last two decades, often under the heading of the Person-Case Constraint (PCC). In this talk I investigate the implications of this work for primary object languages, where the "object marker" controlled by the patient in a monotransitive is controlled by the goal/recipient in a ditransitive. Various prominent syntactic analyses of person restrictions, when put together with commonly assumed ideas about the syntax of primary object languages, lead to the prediction that person restrictions should be absent in ditransitives in languages of this type. This prediction is wrong: in fact, it has proven hard to find a primary object language that LACKS a person restriction in ditransitives. I critically review two lines of analysis that have been pursued regarding these person restrictions, and propose a new approach to their derivation and ubiquity grounded in recent work on the person-case constraint and other hierarchy effects (Deal 2024, Deal and Clem to appear, Deal and Royer to appear).