The featural life of nominals
Ivy Sichel, Maziar Toosarvandani
March 2023 

We introduce a novel locality violation and its repair in Southeastern Sierra Zapotec: an object pronoun cannot cliticize when the subject is a lexical DP. We develop an account in which pronouns and lexical DPs interact with the same probe because they share featural content. In particular, we suggest that the Person domain extends to include non-pronominal DPs, so that all nominals are specified for a feature we call [δ] (to resonate with DP), while all and only personal pronouns are specified for [π]. This account aims to unify the locality violation with the Weak Person Case Constraint (PCC), as well as parallel constraints based on animacy, and requires a departure from Chomsky’s (2000, 2001) classical system of featural co-variation (Agree). In particular, a functional head must be able to overprobe: that is, interact with more than one goal, even if its requirements appear to be met. We introduce a probe activation model for Agree in which, after applying once, the operation can apply again, subject to certain restrictions. We compare probe activation to two other systems recently proposed to account for overprobing: Deal’s (2015, to appear) “insatiable probes” and Coon & Keine’s (2021) “feature gluttony.” Neither is able to account for the locality pattern in Zapotec.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/005523 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	To appear, Linguistic Inquiry
keywords:	nominal structure, features, person, animacy, agree, locality, person case constraint (pcc), pronominal cliticization, defective intervention, object shift
previous versions:	v2 [December 2022] v1 [October 2020]
Downloaded:	1357 times

 

[ edit this article | back to article list ]