Person-animacy hierarchy effects in Chamorro

Person-animacy restrictions (PARs) – whereby the (un)grammaticality of a configuration containing two arguments depends on their ‘person’ and ‘animacy’ values (e.g. Coon & Keine 2021:655) – pose a long-standing theoretical challenge for minimalist syntax, for two reasons: they exhibit large superficial variation; but this variation – e.g. in the specific configurations they disallow – is also robustly constrained (e.g. Stegovec 2019, Hammerly 2020, Clem 2021). This has been taken to favour a unified theory of PARs, which must nonetheless be flexible enough to yield variation (cf. Anagnostopoulou 2017). This talk contributes to the goal of a unified theory of PARs, by introducing to the theoretical fold a previously understudied variant, considering its implications for extant theories, and ultimately modifying the theory of Agree to derive it. This is Chamorro’s PAR (Chung 1998, 2014). Chamorro’s PAR has two properties which are theoretically significant: 1st-person pronouns are completely unrestricted (‘1st-Person Inertness’; 1I); and it is voided in certain contexts when the verb doesn’t bear canonical subject-predicate agreement (‘Voidance-under-noncanonical-agreement’; VUNCA). I argue that these properties mean no extant theory of PARs is adequate for Chamorro: a language-specific morphological account can explain 1I/VUNCA, but at the cost of reducing Chamorro’s systematic adherence to universal constraints on variation to mere accident; and unified syntactic accounts can’t explain 1I in practice, and are inherently incompatible with VUNCA. I take this to motivate a new approach to PARs, dynamic feature gluttony: this combines Coon and Keine’s (2021) feature gluttony with the machinery of dynamic interaction proposed in Deal (2022). I show that this framework explains Chamorro’s PAR, without compromising typological restrictiveness relative to competing theories.

Anagnostopoulou, E. (2017). The Person Case Constraint. In M. Everaert & H. van Riemsdijk (Eds.), The Wiley Blackwell companion to syntax (2nd ed.) (pp. 3001-3047). Oxford: Blackwell.

Chung, S. (1998). The design of agreement: Evidence from Chamorro. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Chung, S. (2014). On reaching agreement late. In A. Beltrama, T. Chatzilonstantinou, J.L. Lee, M. Pham & D. Rak (Eds.), Papers from the 48th regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (vol. 1), 169–190. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.

Clem, E. (2021). Toward a unified account of inverse marking and the Person-Case Constraint. Unpublished manuscript, University of California, San Diego.

Coon, J. & Keine, S. (2021). Feature Gluttony. Linguistic Inquiry, 52(4), 655-710.

Deal, A.R. (2022). Interaction, Satisfaction and the PCC. Linguistic Inquiry. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1162/ling_a_00455

Hammerly, C. (2020). Person-based prominence in Ojibwe. Doctoral dissertation, University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Stegovec, A. (2019). Person on the Edge: Lessons from Crosslinguistic Variation in Syntactic Person Restrictions. Doctoral dissertation, University of Connecticut.