The super-strong Person-Case Constraint: Scarcity of resources by scale-driven Impoverishment

Kambera, a Malayo-Polynesian language, shows a new version of the Person-Case Constraint (PCC), disallowing any combination of phonologically weak objects except the one where the indirect object is 1st/2nd person and the direct object is 3rd person. Recent minimalist accounts fail to capture this new pattern, which, I claim, indicates the existence of a scalar continuum within the constraint's typology. In this paper, I account for this new version as a syntactic rule-interaction effect between Agree and scale-driven impoverishment. I claim that with this mechanism, set along the lines of an Optimality Theoretic version of the Minimalist Program, the whole typology of the PCC can be accounted for.