The Person Case Constraint in Modern Greek: A Unified Dynamic Syntax Analysis

In this paper I look at the so-called Person Case Constraint (PCC) in Modern Greek, arguing that once a shift into a dynamic view of natural language syntax is taken, a straightforward account of the PCC can be given. In specific, I will present a unified analysis based on two analyses both proposed for the same phenomenon within the Dynamic Syntax framework (Kempson et al. 2001, Cann et al. 2005). The one based on Chatzikyriakidis (forthcoming) argues that the PCC arises out of the ordering restrictions on clitics, encoded in the entries of clitics as restrictions on the current parse state. This first analysis will propose a competition-like account of the PCC, where the members of the illicit clitic combinations found in the PCC compete for the first fixed position in the tree. The second analysis based on Kempson et al. (2008) and Kempson et al. (forthcoming) will argue that the PCC is in fact a hard structural constraint, in effect a result of the tree logic of the system, namely the impossibility of having two unfixed nodes at the same time in the sense of Kempson et al. (forthcoming). I will then provide a unified analysis that avoids the main drawbacks of each of the two analyses. 1