Abstract
Like the other Celtic languages, Breton is generally considered to be a VSO language. Stump (1984) argues that affirmative subject-initial sentences in Breton are ordinary subject-verb sentences, and not topicalized verb-subject sentences. His argument is based on the fact that these sentences show no verbal agreement. Stump suggests that this lack of agreement is an instance of a Complementarity Principle, a generalization which states that overt argument NPs do not cooccur with agreement in Breton. In this paper, we show that the empirical generalization underlying Stump's analysis is quite dubious. Moreover, it is impossible to prevent a topicalization analysis for affirmative subject-initial sentences; indeed, evidence from coordination shows that the topicalization analysis must be available. We suggest that the absence of agreement is due to a different generalization: there is no agreement with wh-trace subjects in affirmative clauses. Thus there is no reason to think that Breton has a class of ordinary subject-verb sentences.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Anderson, S. R.: 1982, ‘Where's morphology?’, Linguistic Inquiry 13, 571–612.
Chomsky, N. A.: 1980, ‘On binding’, Linguistic Inquiry 11, 1–46.
Chomsky, N. A.: 1981, Lectures on Government and Binding, Foris, Dordrecht.
Chomsky, N. A.: 1986, Barriers, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Denez, P.: 1980, Geriadur Brezhoneg Douarnenez, Hor Yezh, Lesneven.
Denis, P.: 1977, Étude structurale d'un parler breton, Thèse pour le doctorat ès lettres, Rennes.
Emonds, J. E.: 1980, ‘Word order in generative grammar’, Journal of Linguistic Research 1, 33–54.
Harlow, S.: 1981, ‘Government and relativisation in Celtic’, in F. Heny (ed.), Binding and Filtering, Croom Helm, London, pp. 213–254.
Kervella, F.: 1978, Untitled, Hor Yezh 119, 3–29.
King, P.: 1982, ‘An internal head analysis of the Breton relative clause’, Linguistics 20, 83–95.
McCloskey, J.: 1979, Transformational Syntax and Model Theoretic Semantics: A Case Study in Modern Irish, D. Reidel, Dordrecht.
McCloskey, J. and S. Chung: 1978, ‘Government, barriers and small clauses in Modern Irish’, Linguistic Inquiry 18, 173–237.
McCloskey, J. and K. Hale: 1984, ‘On the syntax of person-number inflection in Modern Irish’, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 1, 487–533.
Pesetsky, D.: 1981, Paths and Categories, Ph.D. dissertation, MIT.
Platzack, C.: 1985, ‘A survey of generative analyses of the verb second phenomenon in Germanic’, Nordic Journal of Linguistics 8, 49–73.
Sag, I. A., G. Gazdar, T. Wasow and S. Weisler: 1985, ‘Coordination and how to distinguish categories’, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 3, 117–171.
Sproat, R.: 1985, ‘Welsh syntax and VSO structure’, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 3, 173–216.
Stump, G. T.: 1984, ‘Agreement vs incorporation in Breton’, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 2, 289–348.
Timm, L. A.: 1986, ‘Word order in twentieth century Breton’, paper presented at the 39th Kentucky Foreign Language Conference, Lexington, Kentucky, April 1986; Published in this issue, NLLT 7, 3 (1989).
Varin, A.: 1979, ‘VSO and SVO structure in Breton’, Archivum Linguisticum 10, 83–101.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Additional information
An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Spring 1986 Meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain. We are grateful to Jim McCloskey, Greg Stump, and a number of anonymous readers for helpful comments.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Borsley, R.D., Stephens, J. Agreement and the position of subjects in Breton. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 7, 407–427 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00208103
Received:
Revised:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00208103