Possessive pronouns as oblique DPs: Linkers and affix stacking

Abstract: In many familiar European languages, e.g. German or Italian, possessive pronouns agree in φ-features with their head noun. We argue that they are genitive pronouns, endowed with an extra φ-features set. As such, they are part of a range of phenomena including case stacking and linkers unified under the historical-typological label of Suffixaufnahme. We express the formal basis for this unification as the Stacking Generalization (Section 1). We then apply our analysis to the narrower domain of facts involving possessive pronouns, specifically in Balkan and Romance languages. We further find that 1/2P pronouns present a richer stacking structure than their 3P counterparts (Section 2). We examine this latter fact in the context of a more general phenomenon, whereby the 1/2P vs 3P Person split not only tends to correlate with different case and agreement alignments – but seems to govern the morphological expression of case and agreement itself, in terms of richer vs poorer content (Section 3).