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The morphosyntax of WH-extraction in Irish

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 June 2001

JAMES McCLOSKEY
JAMES McCLOSKEY
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Cruz
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Abstract

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.

Type
Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , March 2001 , pp. 67 - 100
Copyright
© 2001 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

My thanks to two anonymous JL referees for many helpful suggestions. Many thanks also to Ian Roberts for a very useful and interesting e-mail discussion of the issues.