THE MORPHOSYNTAX OF IRISH AGREEMENT

This paper examines the complementary distribution between agreement and pronouns in Modern Irish. I demonstrate that the Irish agreement patterns are crucially different from those found in more well-studied pro-drop languages, and thus require a different explanation. One explanation previously proposed, that pronouns undergo incorporation in Irish, is shown to be problematic on empirical grounds. Instead of an incorporation-based analysis, I propose an agreement-based analysis, couched in the framework of Distributed Morphology. The analysis requires two modifications to this morphological framework. First, the morphology must operate top-down, instead of bottom-up as previously assumed. Second, the operation of Vocabulary insertion must be clarified, so that morpho-syntactic features unrealized by a Vocabulary item are deleted. Finally, I consider the implications of the Irish data for lexicalist theories of morphology, demonstrating that lexicalist theories need to posit powerful mechanisms of trans-derivational comparision in order to account for the Irish patterns, and that these mechanisms undergenerate. Therefore, the Irish data are concluded to constitute an argument for a post-syntactic morphological component.