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.
Publication Type
- Article