3rd Person Needs Licensing Too: Examining the se/suu Connection
3rd Person Needs Licensing Too: Examining the se/suu Connection

Summary/Abstract: This paper introduces two instances of person effects with 3rd person items – the reflexive clitic se in French and the non-honorific clitic pronoun suu in Punjabi. Examining the properties of these items, we argue against the phi-feature based accounts of person licensing. Instead, we re-conceptualize it as a syntactico-semantic phenomenon, which requires a pronominal to be contextually-anchored via a feature labeled [F]. More globally, this paper attempts to work out the special status of person and articulate why person requires special licensing in grammar.

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