This article advances two main claims. First, it argues that [Spec, VP], the base position of the external argument, is right-branching in French. It is shown that some surprising restrictions imposed on the order of complements in stylistic inversion can then be interpreted in terms of an adjacency condition restricting the occurrence of lexical material between the postverbal subject and its Case checker. Second, it asserts that [Spec, IP], the derived subject position, is occupied by a null expletive, pro. The limited distribution of the construction then follows from the licensing conditions governing the null expletive in French. Further, the proposed analysis sketches a possible interpretation of adjacency phenomena and of the notion of expletives within recent developments of generative grammar.

This article accounts for the distribution and the formal properties of the conjunct verb in Sheshatshit Montagnais within the theoretical model of the Minimalist Program. A subset of the syntactic environments in which the conjunct verb occurs obligatorily is examined: subordinate clauses, non-past wh-questions, and negated clauses. Wh-phrases and subordinate clauses are associated cross-linguistically with a CP projection. It is shown that the two principal negative morphemes in Sheshatshit Montagnais are also associated with a CP projection, thereby obtaining a common underlying structure for clauses requiring conjunct verbs. Central to this analysis is the claim that conjunct verbs move to the Comp position while independent verbs move to Infl. Associating conjunct and independent verbs with distinct functional categories not only predicts their distribution but also accounts for their most distinctive formal properties.

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.

When words are borrowed from one language into another, they are often adapted to conform with the phonological constraints of the borrowing language. This article looks at the adaptation of six hundred loanwords from French and English into Lama in light of the predictions of the Theory of Constraints and Repair Strategies. The Lama data support the Minimality Principle, which predicts that ill-formed structures will be repaired as economically as possible, and the Preservation Principle, which predicts that epenthesis will be favoured over deletion. They also support the claim that the form in which loanwords are stored in the borrowing language is equivalent to the output of the phonology of the source language, even when that includes segments which are ill-formed in the borrowing language. However, the Lama data do not support the Threshold Principle, which predicts deletion when adaptation would be too costly.

Cayuga (Northern Iroquoian) is a pitch accent language displaying different conditions for the accenting and lengthening of even-numbered and odd-numbered penults (counting from left to right). It is shown that Cayuga accent placement is predictable from metrical structure, and that metrical structure is in turn influenced by constraints on syllable structure. Syllable structure constraints are that: 1) all things being equal, coda consonants are parsed as light; and 2) vowel length is dispreferred. In odd-numbered penults, dispreferred syllable structure can be avoided, and this results in accented odd-numbered open penults and unaccented odd-numbered closed penults. In even-numbered penults, dispreferred syllable structure (especially that resulting from lengthening) is required in order to avoid metrically adjacent strong elements, and this results in the accenting of all even-numbered penults. The accenting patterns of Cayuga ultimately derive from the fact that Cayuga is a quantity-sensitive language that disprefers quantity.

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).