Absolutive Promotion and the Condition on Clitic Hosts in Choctaw
Matthew Tyler
May 2018
 

This article develops an analysis of the clitic co-occurrence restrictions found on transitive unaccusative verbs in Choctaw, and how they are (or are not) repaired. It turns out that the repair strategy of Absolutive Promotion, by which a typically-absolutive argument becomes ergative, is sensitive to standard syntactic notions of intervention and locality, implying that it involves a syntactic Agree relation. Regarding the clitic co-occurrence restrictions, I show that they can be captured with the Condition on Clitic Hosts---a condition that syntactic heads can host at most one clitic, adapted from the condition of the same name developed by Arregi & Nevins (2012) for Basque. By detailed comparison with Basque, we see that the Condition on Clitic Hosts and Absolutive Promotion are found in both languages. However, they do not have entirely the same effect: Absolutive Promotion in Choctaw can repair a different set of structures from those it can repair in Basque, and clitics are hosted on a different set of heads in Choctaw than in Basque.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/004037
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: NLLT
keywords: choctaw, syntax, case, agreement, clitics, clitic-doubling, pcc, pcc repair, morphology, syntax
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