The Person-Case Constraint (PCC) is a family of restrictions on the relative person of the two objects of a ditransitive. PCC effects offer a testing ground for theories of Agree and of syntactic features, both those on nominals and those found on agreement probes. This article offers a new theory of PCC effects in an interaction/satisfaction theory of Agree (Deal 2015a) and shows the advantages of this framework in capturing PCC typology. On this model, probes are specified for interaction, determining which features will be copied to them, and for satisfaction, determining which features will cause probing to stop. Applied to the PCC, this theory (a) captures all four types of PCC effect recognized by Nevins (2007) under a unified notion of Agree; (b) captures the restriction of PCC effects to contexts of “Double Weakness” in many prominent examples (e.g., in Italian, Greek, and Basque, where PCC effects hold only when both objects are expressed with clitics); (c) naturally extends to PCC effects in syntactic environments without visible clitics or agreement for one or both objects, as well as to the absence of PCC effects in some languages with clitics or agreement for both objects. Two refinements of the interaction/satisfaction theory are offered: a new notation for probes’ interaction and satisfaction specifications, clarifying the absence of uninterpretable/unvalued features as drivers of Agree; and a proposal for the way that probes’ behavior may change over the course of a derivation, dubbed dynamic interaction .

Applicatives of unaccusatives provide a crucial test case for the inherent-case view of ergativity. If ergative is assigned only to external arguments, in their θ-positions, there can be no “raising to ergative” in applicative unaccusatives; an internal argument subject can never receive ergative case. In this article, I present evidence from Nez Perce (Sahaptian) that this prediction is false. In Nez Perce applicative unaccusatives, the theme argument raises over the applicative argument and is accordingly marked with ergative case. Nez Perce thus demonstrates raising to ergative. Departing from Baker’s (2014) conclusions for similar phenomena in Shipibo (Panoan), I argue that apparently nonlocal movement of the theme in the raising-to-ergative pattern involves not a covert adpositional structure, but rather a response to independently motivated constraints on antilocal movement and remnant movement.

This article studies two aspects of movement in relative clauses, focusing on evidence from Nez Perce. First, I argue that relativization involves cyclic Ā-movement, even in monoclausal relatives: the relative operator moves to Spec,CP via an intermediate position in an Ā outer specifier of TP. The core arguments draw on word order, complementizer choice, and a pattern of case attraction for relative pronouns. Ā cyclicity of this type suggests that the TP sister of relative C constitutes a phase—a result whose implications extend to an ill-understood corner of the English that- trace effect. Second, I argue that Nez Perce relativization provides new evidence for an ambiguity thesis for relative clauses, according to which some but not all relatives are derived by head raising. The argument comes from connectivity and anticonnectivity in morphological case. A crucial role is played by a pattern of inverse case attraction, wherein the head noun surfaces in a case determined internal to the relative clause. These new data complement the range of existing arguments concerning head raising, which draw primarily on connectivity effects at the syntax-semantics interface.

Various languages allow instances of external possession—possessive encoding without a possessive structure in DP. The analysis of these cases has long been a battleground of raising versus control. I provide a new argument from Nez Perce in support of possessor raising of a type thematically parallel to raising to subject. The possessor phrase moves from a possessum-DP-internal position to an athematic A-position within vP. Like raising to subject, this movement is obligatory and does not result in the assignment of a new θ-role to the moving element. A case-driven treatment of possessor raising is proposed.