Multiple new publications in CJL

This month's issue of the Canadian Journal of Linguistics - 64(4) - is a collection of papers from the Manitoba Workshop on Person in September 2017. The introduction is by organizers Will Oxford (Ph.D. 2014, now at the University of Manitoba) and Jila Ghomeshi (Ph.D. 1996, now at the University of Manitoba). Several of the papers are also by current departmental members and alumni:

Bronwyn M. Bjorkman (former postdoc, now at Queen's University), Elizabeth Cowper (faculty), Daniel Currie Hall (Ph.D. 2007, now at St. Mary's Unversity), and Andrew Peters (Ph.D.): "Person and deixis in Heiltsuk pronouns."

Harbour (2016) argues for a parsimonious universal set of features for grammatical person distinctions, and suggests (ch. 7) that the same features may also form the basis for systems of deixis. We apply this proposal to an analysis of Heiltsuk, a Wakashan language with a particularly rich set of person-based deictic contrasts (Rath 1981). Heiltsuk demonstratives and third-person pronominal enclitics distinguish proximal-to-speaker, proximal-to-addressee, and distal (in addition to an orthogonal visibility contrast). There are no forms marking proximity to third persons (e.g., ‘near them’) or identifying the location of discourse participants (e.g., ‘you near me’ vs. ‘you over there’), nor does the deictic system make use of the clusivity contrast that appears in the pronoun paradigm (e.g., ‘this near you and me’ vs. ‘this near me and others’). We account for the pattern by implementing Harbour's spatial element χ as a function that yields proximity to its first- or second-person argument.

Richard Compton (Ph.D. 2012, now at l'Université du Québec à Montréal): "Person complementarity and (pseudo) Person Case Constraint effects: Evidence from Inuktitut."

This paper examines the nature of person complementarity in Eastern Canadian Inuktitut (Eskimo-Aleut), arguing that despite its apparent patterning as a Person Case Constraint (PCC) effect, it is not due to the presence of a defective intervener blocking person agreement with a lower argument, as is often the case in other languages. Instead, the observed effect is caused by a defective or missing person probe on C that cannot value local person features on absolutive arguments. Given the use of the PCC as a diagnostic for differentiating clitics and agreement, this result has implications for the proper identification of φ-marking in Inuktitut.

Tomohiro Yokoyama (Ph.D. 2019): "Dissociating the Person Case Constraint from its 'repair'."

In French ditransitive sentences, certain person combinations of the two internal arguments cannot be expressed with two co-occurring clitics (a phenomenon referred to as the Person Case Constraint or PCC). To fill the interpretational gap created by this restriction, there is an alternative construction characterized as a 'repair', where the goal is realized as an independent phrase. The fact that the double-clitic construction and the repair construction are in complementary distribution led to a proposal of an interface algorithm that provides a way to repair a non-convergent structure. This article proposes an alternative account of the PCC, and claims that the complementarity between the PCC and its repair is instead accidental and is an artefact of the feature structure of arguments. The proposed account explains the unavailability of certain clitic combinations and some repairs independently, without resorting to a trans-derivational device like the previously proposed algorithm.