Raising in Irish and the Projection Principle

This paper provides a new analysis of an exceptional raising construction in Modern Irish, and examines its consequences for two putative principles of Universal Grammar (UG): (i) Chomsky's (1981) Projection Principle, which excludes nonthematic complement positions, and (ii) Chomsky's (1986a) Uniformity Condition, which excludes nonthematic inherent Case assignment. McCloskey (1984) argues that the Irish raising construction involves NP-movement to a VP-internal position, contrary to the Projection Principle. The new analysis proposed here claims that it really involves movement (of an inherently Case-marked NP) to subject position, and thus poses no problem for the Projection Principle. However, this analysis does pose a direct challenge to the Uniformity Condition, since it involves a verb assigning inherent Case to an NP that it does not theta-mark. The paper proposes a new theory of inherent Case assignment that allows for the possibility of the Irish construction, but is sufficiently restrictive so as to account for the rarity of nonthematic inherent Case assignment.

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