Polite Pronouns and the PCC

The Person-Case Constraint (PCC) has played a substantial role in the development of linguistic theory in recent decades, particularly with respect to agreement and the encoding of person (Anagnostopoulou 2017a and references therein). While much of the generative literature on the PCC advances or assumes a (morpho)syntactic agreement-based account of PCC effects, we provide novel evidence from polite pronouns that challenges this perspective. Polite pronouns have the useful property that they exhibit a striking “mismatch” between the features expressed in their agreement and in their forms on the one hand, and what is interpreted on the other. They therefore provide an ideal testing ground for the predictions of morphosyntactic analyses of the PCC, which predict that third-person polite pronouns used for addressees should behave like other third-person arguments and should therefore fail to give rise to PCC effects. We find that this prediction is falsified in Italian for the polite pronoun LEI, which is used for formal address but is grammatically third-person, and for which PCC effects do obtain; we make similar observations for the related person hierarchy effect connected to the so-called Fancy Constraint (Postal 1989). We suggest that the PCC pattern with polite pronouns is more consistent with a syntacticosemantic, interpretation-based account of the PCC, such as that of Pancheva and Zubizarreta (2018), and sketch how this can be captured in their system. Lastly, we suggest that while PCC effects in ditransitives share a grammatical provenance across languages, other person hierarchy effects may not necessarily, and we show how these expectations are borne out with polite pronouns in Spanish (with USTED) and German (with SIE). This study has important implications for the analysis of person hierarchy effects and affirms the relevance of polite pronouns to the theory of agreement.