Contrastive Specification of Person on Syntactic Arguments Andrew Nevins Harvard University In modeling the effects of the Person-Case Constraint (PCC), a common claim is that 3rd person “is not a person”. However, while this claim does work in the syntax, it creates problems in the morphology. For example, characterizing the well-known “spuri- ous se effect” in Spanish simply cannot be done without reference to 3rd person. Inspired by alternatives to underspecification that have emerged in phonology (e.g. Calabrese 1995), a revised feat- ural system is proposed, whereby syntactic agreement may be rel- ativized to certain values of a feature, in particular, the contrastive and marked values. The range of variation in PCC effects is shown to emerge as a consequence of the parametric options allowed on a Probing head, whereas the representation of person remains con- stant across modules of the grammar and across languages. 1. Introduction: Third Person is a Person, too! This study is an attempt to provide featural commensurability between syntactic researchers working on Person-Case effects (Bonet 1991) and morphological researchers working on syn- cretisms and paradigm structure. A simple example illustrates the problem: Modern Greek and Catalan do not tolerate two 1/2 arguments of a ditransitive verb (the strong PCC), and Spanish does not tolerate a 3rd person dative along with a 1/2 accusative. Taking Anagnostopoulou’s (2004) account (to which this paper owes enormous intellectual debts) as an exemplar, we can model the PCC effects as the result of a difference in the featural representation between 1/2 and 3rd person arguments. A common claim is that 3rd person “is not a person” Kayne (2000). However, Harvard Working Papers in Linguistics Vol XI c 2005 Andrew Nevins