Pronominal Possessors and Feature Uniqueness

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.