Issues in the Left Periphery of Modern Irish

Although the syntax of the left periphery of the Irish clausal architecture has been the subject of considerable research within the generative paradigm, many questions remain unresolved. The general goal of this thesis is to explore some of these understudied territories. Specifically, I consider two distinct, but ultimately related phenomena: headless relative clauses and dependent verbal morphology.\n\nI will make four major claims: The first two concern the syntax (and semantics) of the headless relative clause. First, despite the fact that the particles that appear in resumptive relative clauses and in headless relative clauses are morpho-phonologically identical as aN, headless relative clauses are derived by movement, not by means of resumption, and thus the particles in these two constructions are not the same. Second, headless relative clauses are amount relative clauses, in the sense of Carlson (1977); and thus I claim, adopting Grosu and Landman's (1998) notion of complex degree, that the element that undergoes A$'$-movement in a headless relative clause is a complex degree, causing degree-abstraction in the semantics. The maximalization operator then applies to the degree-abstracted relative CP. I argue that it is this operator that triggers the appearance of the particle aN in the headless relative construction.\n\nThe latter two claims concern the morphosyntax of the left periphery of Irish syntax: First, I claim that there are two tense features in a single finite clause domain of Irish, and that the so-called dependent forms of irregular verbs are the surface realization of the two tense features. This account provides a stepping stone to my final claim that a feature agreeing with the maximalization operator, but not the operator itself, is realized in the headless relative particle aN and that the particles found in resumptive relative clauses and in headless relative clauses are in fact distinct Vocabulary Items and thus they are homophonous.\n\nThis thesis thus fills a gap in the descriptive account of Irish syntax, and provides new insights to the theory of relativization.

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