Mazahua

In this work, I explore the Split-S Case/agreement system in Mazahua, a head-marking language where unergative (SA) and transitive subjects (A) cross-reference the same set of agreement affixes in the verb, which differs from the one that cross-reference unaccusative subjects (SP) and objects (P). Additionally, I account for the behaviour of a set of —traditionally called— "emphatic clitics", which show an agreement pattern based on a Person hierarchy constraint that is independent from the agreement mechanism that determines the appearance of verbal affixes. Following the core idea of the Unaccusative Hypothesis (Perlmutter 1978, Burzio 1986) —which proposes that unaccusatives subjects are generated in a lower position than unergative subjects—, I propose that the split can be accounted for by proposing that unaccusative subjects in Mazahua do not receive nominative Case in TP —as argued for other languages (Chomsky 1981, 1995; Massam 1985; Sportiche 1988, among others)—, but are assigned accusative from v° in situ. This idea builds on Coon (2010, 2013, 2017), who proposes a generalization that requires v-heads to assign a single Case to their internal arguments in some languages. On the other hand, I propose that the emphatic clitics are the spell-out of a functional F-head linked to discourse topic and located in the vP Left-Periphery. This head establishes an Agree relation with the DP that bears the most highly specified π-features in their search domain. This occurs regardless of the DP's grammatical function, which causes an agreement displacement in some syntactic environments (Béjar and Rezac 2009).