events and series

Irish verbal paradigms and the pronominal structure of inflection

Jonathan Brennan (New York University)
November 10, 2009 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

Many languages allow a pronoun to go unpronounced in the presence of person/number inflection. This talk will examine the hypothesis that inflection in such instances can be a kind of pronoun using data from Irish Gaelic. Irish exhibits a well-known complementary distribution between person/number inflection and pronouns with both verbs and prepositions. This complementarity follows if inflection is taken to be a clitic-like element which forms a syntactic chain with a pronoun in argument position, contra proposals that treat inflection as a reflex of agreement with a null pronoun. The hypothesis is first motivated using data from prepositional inflection, and then extended to provide a novel and empirically superior analysis of an apparent analytic/synthetic alternation in verbal paradigms, suggesting that such alternations do not involve syntactic blocking.