Clitics and Agreement in Competition: Ergative cross-referencing patterns

Clitics and agreement are in competition as alternative devices for crossreferencing arguments. This paper demonstrates that a small set of constraints developed in work on OT Syntax to account for aspects of agreement and clitic behavior in nominative-accusative languages, when reranked, predicts the existence not only of simple ergative cross-referencing patterns (e.g. as in Selayarese), but also complex split ergative patterns (e.g. as in Yimas). This exciting result indicates that the OT approach to clitics and agreement is on the right track, and it provides further support for the claim in Woolford 1997, 2001, based on Case, that no additional machinery or parameters have to be added to the theory to account for ergative languages.

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