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

The Person Case Constraint blocks 1 st /2 nd 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.

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