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Post-Syntactic Movement and the Old Irish Verb

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Abstract

The placement of second position clitics has been analysed as involving syntactic movement, morphological transpositions, or prosodic inversion. This paper argues that a syntactic treatment of the Old Irish verbal complex is untenable and that facts about allomorphy and phonological phrasing preclude a prosodic inversion analysis. I show how application of a morphological transposition operation (the Morphological Merger operation in a Distributed Morphology framework) not only to overt clitics in the language, but also to the functional head Force, provides a unified analysis of this highly intricate system.

Many thanks to no less than five anonymous referees, who have helped shape this paper, to audiences at Essex, Cambridge, University College London and Stuttgart. Thanks also to Daniel Harbour for comments on a draft and to Aiden Doyle for fixing my clumsy translation of Old Irish. This work was supported by AHRB Grant APN-11524.

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  1. Department of Linguistics, Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, London, E1 4NS, UK

    David Adger

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Adger, D. Post-Syntactic Movement and the Old Irish Verb. Nat Language Linguistic Theory 24, 605–654 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-006-0004-4

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