Choctaw and some Basque dialects share a common mechanism to repair PCC violations in transitive unaccusative verbs. This repair, termed Absolutive Promotion (Arregi & Nevins 2012), involves 'promoting' an absolutive argument by assigning it ergative case. As a result, it is doubled by an ergative clitic rather than an absolutive one, and there is no PCC violation. However, Basque and Choctaw differ in terms of which internal argument is targeted for promotion. I propose that this difference is determined by the presence vs. absence of dative case on the higher of the two internal arguments.