Inverse marking and the Person-Case Constraint (PCC) are both types of
person hierarchy effects that hold between arguments. Drawing on data from
four Indigenous languages of North America, I observe that all four widely
recognized varieties of the PCC have parallels in inverse marking. This
similarity in the attested patterns suggests that the two phenomena should
receive a unified treatment. I argue that the core of the phenomena are the
same and that there are two factors that yield the surface differences
between patterns of inverse marking and the PCC. The first factor is the
height of the agreement probe that is implicated in the hierarchy effect,
leading to a difference in whether it is the subject and object that are
involved in the restriction or the two objects in a ditransitive. I propose
that the second factor that differentiates the two types of hierarchy
effects is the type of repair strategies that are available to remedy
unacceptable person combinations, with inverse marking itself representing
a repair. I argue for a unified account of the two phenomena drawing on
Deal's (2021) interaction and satisfaction account of the PCC, and I
demonstrate that this style of analysis has greater empirical coverage than
competitors. Finally, I show that this account of the parallels and
differences between inverse marking and the PCC predicts the existence of
two additional types of person hierarchy effects, both of which are
attested.