On the unifiability of repairs for the Person Case Constraint: French, Basque, Georgian and Chinook

Abstract

The Person Case Constraint blocks 1st/2nd person agreement in the presence of an applicative dative. Unlike other sources of ungrammaticality, it often has repairs: constructions that exist only to fix it and not otherwise. Across the four languages considered here, the repairs are apparently heterogeneous, 'constructional': clitic-to-strong dative, agreeing-to-nonagreeing dative, pronoun-to-'pronoun's self' object, absolutive-to-ergative subject. Yet there are profound and far-reaching commonalities across them, hinting at a single mechanism of strengthening by added Case that underlies them all.