Speaker: James Morley (MIT)
Title: An “Only-You” restriction in Chamorro and the problems it poses for the theory of hierarchy effects
Time: Tuesday, November 4th, 1pm – 2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: This talk investigates a person-animacy restriction – henceforth PAR – in Chamorro (Malayo-Polynesian; Austronesian), previously reported in Chung (1998, 2014, 2020) but which has otherwise been subject to little theoretical attention. Chamorro’s PAR prohibits internal arguments from ‘outranking’ external arguments with respect to the hierarchy in (1).
Chamorro-specific person-animacy hierarchy 2nd person > 3rd person animate pronouns > 3rd person animate lexical nouns > Inanimate
Chamorro instantiates what Stegovec (2019, i.a.) calls a *3>2 or “Only-You” person restriction: although 2nd and 3rd person have their distributions constrained by the restriction, 1st person does not. In this talk I make two kinds of argument. First, I argue that this restriction should not be reduced to a language-specific morphological restriction, pace Chung (2014), but should rather be treated as (at least partly) syntactic in nature. The null hypothesis is thus that it should be explained by the same mechanisms postulated elsewhere to capture other syntactic PARs. Second, I argue that this has not been achieved. More specifically, current theories of PARs are either logically incompatible with the Chamorro data, or else incur conceptual or empirical problems when amended to accommodate it. I then sketch some preliminary ideas about how to go about solving this.