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Pronominal Possessors and Feature Uniqueness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin  and
Ion Giurgea
Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin*
Affiliation:
LLFICNRS and University Paris 7
Ion Giurgea*
Affiliation:
Iorgu Iordan-Al. Rosetti' Institute of Linguistics and University of Constance
*
Dobrovie-Sorin Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle 175, rue du Chevaleret 75013 Paris, France [sorin@linguist.jussieu.fr]
Giurgea Institutul de Lingvistică ‘Iorgu Iordan – Al. Rosetti’ Calea 13 Septembrie 13 050711 Bucharest, Romania [giurgeaion@yahoo.com]
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Abstract

This article explains the correlation between agreeing and nonagreeing forms of pronominal possessors and their person features in Romanian and other Indo-European languages: first- and second-person pronouns agree, whereas third-person pronouns are nonagreeing forms marked with genitive case. We show that the distribution of agreeing and nonagreeing pronominal forms follows from a constraint of FEATURE UNIQUENESS, which prevents a pronominal root from merging with more than one set of inflectional features (distinguished from lexical features, which belong to the root). The analysis is shown to extend to the agreeing third-person possessors found in most Romance and Germanic languages and to the Slavic agreeing nominal possessors.

Keywords

(agreeing) possessorscasefeaturesgenitivespronouns

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 87 , Issue 1 , March 2011 , pp. 126 - 157
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 Linguistic Society of America

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