Proceedings of the LFG 01 Conference University of Hong Kong , Hong Kong Editors : Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway

The same categorical phenomena which are attributed to hard grammatical constraintsin some languages continue to show up as statistical preferences in other languages, moti-vating a grammatical model that can account for soft constraints.The effects of a hierarchy of person (1st, 2nd 3rd) on grammar are categorical insome languages, most famously in languages with inverse systems, but also in languageswith person restrictions on passivization. In Lummi, for example, the person of the subjectargument cannot be lower than the person of a nonsubject argument. If this would hap-pen in the active, passivization is obligatory; if it would happen in the passive, the activeis obligatory (Jelinek and Demers 1983). These facts follow from the theory of harmonicalignment in OT: constraints favoring the harmonic association of prominent person (1st,2nd) with prominent syntactic function (subject) are hypothesized to be present as sub-hierarchies of the grammars of all languages, but to vary in their effects across languagesdepending on their interactions with other constraints (Aissen 1999). There is a statisticalreflection of these hierarchies in English. The same disharmonic person/argument associ-ations which are avoided categorically in languages like Lummi by making passives eitherimpossible or obligatory, are avoided in the SWITCHBOARD corpus of spoken English byeither depressing or elevating the frequency of passives relative to actives. The Englishdata can be grammatically analyzed within the stochastic OT framework (Boersma 1998,Boersma and Hayes 2001) in a way which provides a principled and unifying explanationfor their relation to the crosslinguistic categorical person effects studied by Aissen (1999).