This article examines the placement of weak pronominal objects in Goidelic Celtic. These elements appear in a far-right position in the clause, in spite of their prosodic lightness. Previous analyses have put this phenomenon down to either a language and construction specific rule, or to a side effect of clausal organisation. The article examines the most articulated current version of the latter option, shows how it suffers from serious empirical and conceptual problems and develops in its place an approach in which the pronouns remain internal to the verb phrase with their precise position determined by prosodic factors. This collapses the surprising behaviour of weak pronouns in Goidelic with that of weak pronouns in Germanic. The apparent differences in the positioning of pronouns between the two language families derive from independent aspects of clausal architecture. The new approach uses a much less articulated clausal structure but an enriched view of the syntax-prosody interface.

The most common mutation system of Welsh, soft mutation, affects among other elements the object of a finite verb. This is often known as direct object mutation (DOM). Objects have accusative Case in many languages. Hence, it is natural to consider the possibility that DOM is a manifestation of accusative Case, and this has been proposed by a number of people. There is evidence, however, that this idea is both too strong and too weak. It predicts soft mutation where it does not in fact occur, and there are a number of instances of soft mutation which appear to form a natural class with DOM but cannot plausibly be analyzed as a manifestation of accusative Case. A widely discussed alternative to a Case-based view of DOM is one in which DOM is triggered by a preceding phrase of some kind. This approach looks quite promising. However, it does not fit readily into the Principles and Parameters framework. It seems, then, that DOM poses a major challenge for this framework.

The number of copular constructions found with non-verbal predicates in Universal Grammar has recently been a matter of some controversy. Traditional theories have claimed that there are two constructions: an equative—with two argument NPs—and predicative—with a single argument and a non-verbal predicate. Recently this bifurcation has been challenged by authors who claim that equative constructions show asymmetries similar to those found in predicatives, and that these asymmetries are due to a simple subject/predicate distinction. They claim that there is a single predicative copular construction in natural language. In this article, syntactic evidence for the traditional semantic division between equatives and predicatives is provided. It is shown that in Modern Irish, there are two word orders corresponding to the equative/predicative split and these two have distinct syntactic and semantic properties. Further, it is also shown that the asymmetries used to argue for a single copular construction are due to simple structural conditions rather than a subject/predicate split.

This article offers a unified syntactic treatment of initial mutation in Modern Irish, one of the best-known characteristics of that language. Both types of consonant mutation, as well as the less-studied mutations affecting vowels, are discussed. It is proposed that the appearance of initial mutation is a function of particular structural configurations: mutation is triggered by lexicalized functional heads. It is shown how this analysis applies in three syntactic contexts: before clausal predicates; within noun phrases; and following prepositions. Special attention is given to the problem raised by exceptional forms, and, in particular, to the problem of variable constraints on “spreading” (whereby mutation spreads to following modifiers only in certain instances).

This article sketches a novel approach to the phenomenon traditionally referred to as complementizer variation in Irish, and provides an alternative analysis to the standard one proposed by McCloskey (1990). It is argued that the two variants of the particle surfacing in Ā-constructions are not in fact complementizers per se, but the head of a Focus projection (FP), whose specifier provides an escape hatch for wh-phrases. FP interacts with C in two different ways, and depending on which of the options apply, F surfaces in two variants: (i) F incorporates to C, or (ii) FP raises to [Spec, CP]. The particle traditionally analysed as a resumptive strategy complementizer constitutes a case of (i), and the one traditionally analysed as a movement strategy complementizer is a case of (ii). It is shown how this approach avoids some serious empirical problems posed by the previous analysis of the phenomenon. It is furthermore argued that the process underlying successive cyclic wh-movement in fact involves covert successive pied-piping of CPs, where covert pied-piping is understood as overt pied-piping of the features of CP.

The central hypothesis of this article is that Welsh direct object mutation—the only instance of mutation in the Celtic languages not triggered by a specific lexical item—is the PF-realisation of AgrO’s accusative Case as the floating lenition-triggering phonological feature L (cf. Lieber 1983 and Zwicky 1984). The analysis proposed in this article is an empirically adquate analysis of initial consonant mutation in Welsh, which fully integrates direct object mutation with other cases of mutation, relates mutation to phonosyntactic processes found in other languages, notably Southern Italian /u/-propagation (Rizzi and Savoia 1991) and French liaison (Manzini 1983), and fits naturally into a non-checking-theoreticconception of Parametric Variation of the sort outlined in Roberts and Roussou (1997a).

This article explores long head movement configurations in Breton. Its purpose is twofold. First it contributes to existing work by demonstrating that Breton long head movement is motivated by information structure. The operation of general economy principles, made sensitive to information structure, determines many of the properties of the Breton construction. Secondly, it is argued that the derivation of the Breton construction does not involve movement per se; minimality conditions on movement are not central to the derivation. Instead, the remaining properties of the construction are attributed to a semantic property of tense-aspect markers which is represented at the LF interface. This work bears on the issue of how to model the interpretive dependency between auxiliaries and main verbs and raises questions concerning the interaction between the stylistic component, information structure, and the LF interface.

In Breton, lexical subjects occur both in finite clauses and infinitival clauses. Within the Principles and Parameters model, the question arises as to how infinitival subjects can be Case-licensed, since the finite Tense element associated with Case-licensing in finite clauses is absent from infinitival clauses. Infinitival subjects are, however, preceded by some prepositional element, and previous accounts have proposed that these are Case-markers, assigning abstract Case to the subjects. However, prepositional elements also occur in controlled infinitival clauses—which have the null subject PRO—yet lexical subjects and PRO are not interchangeable. In this article, it is proposed that the crucial property associated with the Case-licensing of lexical subjects in all Breton clause types is subject agreement. This occurs not only on finite verbs, but also on the prepositional elements in infinitival clauses, which are sometimes complementizers and sometimes AgrSP heads. Clauses containing PRO, however, lack subject agreement, and hence cannot license lexical subjects.