McLing is happy to report that Jessica Coon and Stefan Keine’s paper “Feature Gluttony” has been accepted for publication in the journal Linguistic Inquiry.
Abstract:
This paper develops a new approach to a family of hierarchy effect-inducing configurations, with a focus on Person Case Constraint (PCC) effects, dative-nominative configurations, and copula constructions. The main line of approach in the recent literature is to attribute these effects to failures of phi-Agree or, more specifically, failures of nominal licensing or case checking. We propose that the problem in these configurations is unrelated to nominal licensing, but is instead the result of a probe participating in more than one Agree dependency, a configuration we refer to as feature gluttony. Feature gluttony does not in and of itself lead to ungrammaticality, but rather can create irresolvably conflicting requirements for subsequent operations. We argue that in the case of clitic configurations, a probe which agrees with more than one DP creates an intervention problem for clitic-doubling. In violations involving morphological agreement, gluttony in features may result in a configuration with no available morphological output.