Abstract for Oana Ciucivara's talk

TBA
Oana Ciucivara (New York University)
April 19, 2005 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM; Room 6417, the CUNY Graduate Center

Bonet (1991) has claimed that the Person Case Constraint (*me lui constraint), banning the co-occurrence of a 3rd person dative clitic and a 1st or 2nd person accusative clitic, is a universal condition governing the distribution of pronominal clitics.

I present evidence from Romanian that Bonet's original formulation of the constraint is too strong a claim. Also, I argue that the combinatorial person and case restrictions that pronominal clitics are subject to in Romanian fall out from a system in which clitics undergo feature driven movement to two different types of functional projections in the functional sequence: an AgrO projection, where clitics check structural case and a Person projection, where clitics are subsequently attracted to move to check uninterpretable person features.