Skip to main content
Apply Give
Menu

S-Lab - Stefan Keine (UCLA) / Silencing the PCC

Close portrait of a man with a thin face, blonde hair, glasses, and a stubbly chin, smiling delightedly at the camera: Lo, it be Stefan Keine, Assistant Professor of Linguistics at UCLA.

S-Lab - Stefan Keine (UCLA) / Silencing the PCC

Linguistics Tuesday, March 8, 2022 12:30 pm - 1:45 pm Marie Mount Hall, 1108B

March 8, S-Lab has a special guest, joining remotely from Los Angeles: Stefan Keine, Assistant Professor of Linguistics at UCLA. Stefan presents joint work with Cornell's Jon Ander Mendia, "Silencing the PCC." 

Silencing the PCC

The Person Case Constraint (PCC) is a crosslinguistically common restriction on possible combinations of person features, typically observed in (but not limited to) ditransitive constructions. Basque is one such language: an absolutive DP that appears below a dative DP cannot be 1st or 2nd person. We present novel evidence that the PCC in Basque is obviated under verbal ellipsis: DPs whose cooccurrence is ordinarily ruled out by the PCC are surprisingly permitted if the verb and the agreeing auxiliary are elided. We then explore the consequences of this generalization for accounts of the PCC. We argue that a comprehensive account of the Basque PCC must be sensitive to both narrow-syntactic and PF properties (in particular, whether or not syntactic structure is pronounced). We develop an account of the Basque PCC based on Coon & Keine's (2021) feature-gluttony approach, and we show that such an account offers a principled explanation of both the syntactic factors and the PF factors that condition the Basque PCC, in particular the interaction of the PCC with verbal ellipsis.

Add to Calendar 03/08/22 12:30:00 03/08/22 13:45:00 America/New_York S-Lab - Stefan Keine (UCLA) / Silencing the PCC

March 8, S-Lab has a special guest, joining remotely from Los Angeles: Stefan Keine, Assistant Professor of Linguistics at UCLA. Stefan presents joint work with Cornell's Jon Ander Mendia, "Silencing the PCC." 

Silencing the PCC

The Person Case Constraint (PCC) is a crosslinguistically common restriction on possible combinations of person features, typically observed in (but not limited to) ditransitive constructions. Basque is one such language: an absolutive DP that appears below a dative DP cannot be 1st or 2nd person. We present novel evidence that the PCC in Basque is obviated under verbal ellipsis: DPs whose cooccurrence is ordinarily ruled out by the PCC are surprisingly permitted if the verb and the agreeing auxiliary are elided. We then explore the consequences of this generalization for accounts of the PCC. We argue that a comprehensive account of the Basque PCC must be sensitive to both narrow-syntactic and PF properties (in particular, whether or not syntactic structure is pronounced). We develop an account of the Basque PCC based on Coon & Keine's (2021) feature-gluttony approach, and we show that such an account offers a principled explanation of both the syntactic factors and the PF factors that condition the Basque PCC, in particular the interaction of the PCC with verbal ellipsis.

 Marie Mount Hall false