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The present paper aims to investigate the role of person-distinctions in the syntax of pronominal arguments. To this end, here I will study an alleged "morphological" condition called the Person Constraint, which narrows the set of combinations of Dative and Absolutive person agreement markers allowed by the language:
(1) Person Constraint: If DAT, then ABS must be 3rd person (Bonet, 1994)
Relying on the study of such phenomenon, this paper will argue, in the spirit of Jelinek (1993, 1996) and related work, that 1st and 2nd person pronouns differ fom 3rd person ones as to their referentiality value, where the notion of "referentiality" is closely related to that of "presuppositionality" and refers to pronominals' ability to unambiguously identify entities in the discourse. In this respect, the former will be shown to be more referential than the latter.
Moreover, this difference will be claimed to have important syntactic consequences at the level of Logical Form (LF), where an interpretative condition requires that the most referential (or presuppositional) arguments c-command the least referential (or presuppositional) ones: that is, 1st and 2nd person pronominal elements must c-command 3rd person ones at LF. Thus, our syntactic cheracterization of the phenomenon will straightforwardly account for some otherwise unexpected exceptions to the descriptive generalization in (1) in the language.
Finally, a systematic correlation between presence/absence of agreement morphology and activation/neutralization of the effects of the condition will be captured by means of the proposal of different Conditions on the Reduction of Ì-Chains at LF.
Literatur:
Bonet, Eulalia. 1994. The Person-Case Constraint: A Morphological Approach. In Heidi Harley and Colin Philipps (eds.), The Morphology-Syntax Connection, MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 22, pp. 33-53. Cambridge: MITWPL.
Jelinek, Eloise. 1993. Ergative "splits" and argument type. In MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 18. Cambridge: MITWPL.
---. 1996. Definiteness and Second Position CLitics in Straits Salish. In Aaron Halpern and
Arnold M. Zwicky (eds.), Approaching Second: Second Position Clitics and Related Phenomena, pp. 271-298. CSLI, Stanford.
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