The starting point for this talk is Deal's (2024) analysis of the person case constraint (PCC). The PCC refers to a set of co-occurrence restrictions of theme and recipient arguments in ditransitive constructions mostly (but not only) when these arguments are expressed as clitics or weak pronouns. For example, in a common PCC pattern, a first person theme argument cannot co-occur with a third person recipient argument (weak PCC in Italian, Greek, or Swahili).
Deal (2024) proposes an analysis of this and other PCC patterns in her interaction and satisfaction framework. She suggests that the agreeing verb enters an Agree relation with the theme first and the recipient second. On this approach (theme-first), the features of the theme (say, first person) restrict the features the recipient can have (leading to ungrammaticality in the case of a third person recipient). This restriction on Agree relations is due to “dynamic interaction”.
In Bárány (2024), I discuss case and agreement alignment in ditransitive constructions and argue that only certain logically possible combinations of case-marking and object agreement are attested. Crucially, the analysis of this typological pattern relies on the assumption that the verb agrees with the recipient first and the theme second (recipient-first), in exactly the opposite order to Deal's proposal.
I will present an implementation of a recipient-first analysis of the PCC patterns discussed by Deal (2024) which, I hope, might combine some of the advantages of Deal's proposals with the analysis of the typological gap in Bárány (2024).
References:
Bárány, András. 2024. Case and agreement alignment in ditransitive constructions: A typological gap and its explanation. Language 100(3). 385–432.
Deal, Amy Rose. 2024. Interaction, satisfaction, and the PCC. Linguistic Inquiry 55(1). 39–94.