Abstract for Oana Ciucivara's talk

An Apparrent Number Case Constraint in Romanian. (with Andrew Nevins)
Oana Ciucivara (New York University)
October 7, 2008 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

Romanian pronominal plural clitics are different from their singular counterparts in that they exhibit dative-accusative case syncretism. This correlates with an asymmetry in the co-occurrence restrictions of plural vs singular clitics: specifically, plural clitics in DO position affect the acceptability of clitic clusters. Rather than invoking a new ‘Number Case Constraint’ governing the distribution of clitics, we link the Romanian data to familiar facts from Leista dialects of Spanish, which manifest case syncretism between dative and accusative 3rd person clitics. We implement the fact that 1st and 2nd person plural clitics in Romanian are case-syncretic by implicationally marking them as inherently [+animate] in the syntax. The severe degradation of clusters with direct object plural clitics is accounted for by following aspects of Adger & Harbour’s (2007) proposal for the connection between syncretism and the Person Case Constraint.