3rd Person Needs Licensing Too: Examining the se/suu Connection

Abstract

This paper introduces two instances of person effects with 3 rd person items – the reflexive clitic se in French and the non-honorific clitic pronoun suu in Punjabi. Examining the properties of these items, we argue against the phi-feature based accounts of person licensing. Instead, we re-conceptualize it as a syntactico-semantic phenomenon, which requires a pronominal to be contextually-anchored via a feature labeled [F]. More globally, this paper attempts to work out the special status of person and articulate why person requires special licensing in grammar.