James McCloskey

Quantifier Float and Wh-Movement in an Irish English

The English of northwestern Ireland allows quantifier float of a previously undocumented kind in wh-questions. The quantifier all, though construed with a fronted wh-pronoun, may appear in a position considerably to the right of that pronoun. It is argued that all so stranded marks a position through which a wh-phrase has passed or in which a wh-phrase originates. The construction then provides visible evidence for intermediate derivational stages. This evidence is used to develop a new argument for successive cyclicity and to argue for overt object shift in English and for an origin site for subjects strictly within VP and below the object shift position.

Subjecthood and Subject Positions

The notion of “subject” is fundamental in Aristotelian logic and in almost all Western traditions of thinking about philology and grammar.* It is also fundamental to certain strands of thought within the broad tradition of generative grammar – notably Relational Grammar and Lexical Functional Grammar. However, in the tradition which extends from the “Standard Theory” through the “Extended Standard Theory” to “Principles and Parameters Theory” and then to the “Minimalist Program”, the notion of subject plays no formal role at all. Not only is “subject” not a primitive term in these theories, but in their most recent instantiations it is not even clear that there is any derived or defined notion which captures the traditional intuition of what a subject is (as there was, for instance, in the theory of Chomsky 1965). What we have seen, in a sense, is a progressive deconstruction of the traditional category “subject” so that the properties which are supposed to define it are distributed across a range of distinct (but derivationally linked) syntactic entities and positions. This theoretical eccentricity may turn out to have been foolish or wise, but it is certainly grounded in some of the deeper methodological instincts of generative grammar. My purpose in this contribution is to consider some recent proposals about the syntax of subject” nod, to try to place those proposals in a broader theoretical and historical perspective, and to evaluate their plausibility at least in a tentative way.

On the scope of verb movement in Irish

This paper is concerned with one aspect of the syntactic processes which derive VSO order in (Modern) Irish. Analyses which appeal to fronting of the finite verb have played an important role in recent theorizing about the VSO clausal pattern. A question which has resisted resolution, however, is the question of what the target-position for this fronting is: does the verb move as far as the C0-position, or does it remain among the inflectional projections?This paper argues that the kind of Verb Fronting found in Irish involves only fronting of V0 to I0, and that it is, as a consequence, different in important ways from Verb Fronting of the Germanic type. The analytical challenges posed by the Irish data are, however, made more interesting by the fact that the sequence of Complementizer, Inflectional element and Verb clearly forms a unit-a word at least for phonological purposes. It is an interesting issue how this conclusion is compatible with the conclusion that there is no general fronting of I0 to C0 in Irish (finite) clauses. It is argued that the Verbal Complex is formed by two movements — raising of V0 to I0 and lowering of C0 to I0. The question of how this conclusion can be compatible with current theories of movement and of locality constraints on movement is the final matter addressed.

The morphosyntax of WH-extraction in Irish

It has been widely assumed that the preverbal particles of Irish are complementizers. Given the distribution of the particle aL , this assumption provides support for two central claims about WH-movement – that its application is successive-cyclic, and that it is driven by a morphosyntactic feature of the complementizer. However, the claim that aL is a complementizer also has been widely challenged. This paper aims to (re)confirm the original analysis. It argues that the sceptical literature (i) underestimates the morphosyntactic heterogeneity of Irish complementizers, and (ii) restricts attention to an overly narrow subset of constructions in which aL appears.

On the relationship of typology to theoretical syntax

Abstract In these remarks on the relationship between typology and theoretical (morpho) syntax, we touch briefly on three issues: what is their relationship in practice now, what relationship should one in principle expect given the founding goals of each enterprise, and what kind of research could help connect the two fields in a more productive way in the future.

On the Right Edge in Irish

This paper examines rightward positioning phenomena in Irish and looks particularly at their interaction with the focusing particle fein. It uses that interaction as a probe to distinguish among three theoretical options for explaining such right-edge phenomena.

The Distribution of Subject Properties in Irish

Virtually no one who has thought seriously about language and its structure has been able to avoid using the terms ‘subject’ and ‘object’. This is a remarkable fact - that perceptive and knowledgeable observers have been willing to talk about ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ in very disparate languages and feel reasonably confident that they knew what they were talking about. It is all the more remarkable, then, that in the intellectual tradition represented by the frameworks of ‘Government and Binding’, ‘Principles and Parameters’ and the ‘Minimalist Program’, the notions play no (recognized) role at all. That tradition has always insisted that talk of ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ is either illicit or casual, and that reference to such terms is to be cashed out in terms of more primitive notions (phrase-structural measures of prominence, featural properties of heads, the theory of A-movement and so on).

Lightest to the Right: An Apparently Anomalous Displacement in Irish

This article analyzes mismatches between syntactic and prosodic constituency in Irish and attempts to understand those mismatches in terms of recent proposals about the nature of the syntax-prosody interface. It argues in particular that such mismatches are best understood in terms of Selkirk’s (2011) Match Theory, working in concert with constraints concerned with rhythm and phonological balance. An apparently anomalous rightward movement that seems to target certain pronouns and shift them rightward is shown to be fundamentally a phonological process: a prosodic response to a prosodic dilemma. The article thereby adds to a growing body of evidence for the role of phonological factors in shaping constituent order.

Annotating the Implicit Content of Sluices

This paper reports on an eort to develop a linguistically-informed annotation scheme for sluicing (Ross, 1969), ellipsis that leaves behind a wh-phrase. We describe a scheme for annotating the elided content, both in terms of a free text representation and its degree of correspondence with its antecedent. We demonstrate that we can achieve reasonable IAA ( between .78 and .88 across eight annotation types) and describe some of the novel patterns that have arisen from this eort.

The Syntax of Questions

I have gone to a lot of trouble in previous sections to defend what is perhaps not a particularly controversial proposal — namely that relativization strategies can involve unbounded deletions. Such proposals for relative clauses are by now common in the literature and have been made, for instance, for English (Morgan, 1972; Bresnan, 1972, for example), Middle English (Grimshaw, 1975), Albanian (Morgan, 1972), Basque (deRijk, 1972), and Old Icelandic (Maling, 1977).