MaxElide and Clause Structure in Scottish Gaelic

1 Goidelic Clause Structure

The Goidelic languages (Scottish Gaelic, Irish) have basic vsox word order in finite clauses, and many authors have proposed that this order is derived by moving the finite verb to T, as in Romance, but leaving the subject in situ in Spec,vP (see McCloskey 1983, 1991, 1996, Ramchand 1997). The most compelling evidence for this structure—in particular, the proposal that the verb moves to T—is that the verb only moves in finite clauses; in nonfinite clauses, the verb stays in situ, with the subject to its left. Finiteness distinctions condition verb movement to T in French and other languages (Pollock 1989), so it is proposed that this is what we see in Gaelic and Irish. On this analysis, the only difference between Goidelic and Romance is whether subjects need to move to Spec,TP: this is required in Romance, but not required (and hence, by economy, not possible) in Goidelic (see, e.g., Baker 2002).

More recently, it has been argued that the subject also raises to some vP-external position. Evidence for this additional raising component comes from the fact that the subject always precedes clause-internal adverbs and aspectual particles (McCloskey 1997, 2001, 2011, Alexiadou and Anagnostopoulou 1998, Adger 2000); moreover, in clauses with derived subjects, such as unaccusatives, subjects do show signs of having moved from their VP-internal position to some higher one adjacent to the verb (see especially McCloskey 2001). However, this derived subject position does not display the ‘‘EPP (Extended Projection Principle) property,’’ in that it does not need to be filled by an expletive in the absence of a DP argument; assuming that this ‘‘EPP property’’ distinguishes Spec,TP, and that the verb is in T, the cited authors conclude that this subject position is some lower specifier position in the inflectional domain, the nature of which remains somewhat mysterious. Analyses differ on exactly what drives this subject raising, but virtually all authors agree that the landing site is not Spec,TP.¹

However, there is actually little empirical evidence for concluding that the subject position is not Spec,TP, beyond the fact that this position does not have the EPP property (an observation that only makes sense in the context of an explicit theory of the EPP). It is argued in the cited works that it is the position of the verb that diagnoses the position of the subject, but this is based on the assumption that the verb must be in T and cannot be in some higher head position. This assumption seems to be carried over as a result of early discussion of Irish by McCloskey (1991, 1996), who argued that the landing site for verb movement cannot be C; however, McCloskey’s arguments crucially depended upon C being a single head, an assumption largely abandoned since Rizzi’s (1997) cartographic expansion of the left periphery (see, e.g., Hendrick 2000, Roberts 2005 for discussion of Celtic).

In this squib, I present evidence from ellipsis indicating that the verb indeed moves to a position above T and that the subject Amoves to Spec,TP in Scottish Gaelic, contra widely held assumptions. I therefore conclude that it would be appropriate to reassess what Celtic VSO tells us about clause structure and the EPP.

2 MaxElide and the Position of Variables

The diagnostic that is used here is MaxElide (Merchant 2008), a condition on ellipsis that ensures that larger ellipsis sites are chosen over smaller ones within precisely defined domains. Here I will outline the implementation of MaxElide developed by Takahashi and Fox (2005) and Hartman (2011).

The basic purpose of MaxElide is to account for English data like (1), which shows that VP-ellipsis is often not possible when sluicing is an option in the same clause.

1. (1). Mary was kissing someone, but I don’t know who (*she was).

Building on an earlier version of Merchant 2008, Takahashi and Fox (2005) propose an account in terms of ellipsis parallelism, such that the constraint favoring the larger ellipsis site only applies in domains in which parallelism is satisfied, called...