MODERN IRISH VERBAL INFLECTION
PAOLO ACQUAVIVA
The categories of Modern Irish verbal inflection1
PAOLO ACQUAVIVA
University College Dublin
(Received 10 August 2012; revised 4 December 2013)
Abstract
This paper sets out to identify the categories underlying Irish verbal inflection and to
explain why they have their observed morphological and semantic properties. Assuming
that the semantic range of a tense is a function of the whole clause, it derives the tenses
of Irish from three syntactic features. Their basic value and position in the clause, along
with that of other independently justified formatives, determines the attested range of
interpretations for each tense, while the way they are spelled out determines the
observed morphological patterns. Since the analysis of verbal categories is based on
their syntactic realization, the same explanation accounts for the paradigmatic structure
of Irish conjugation and for various syntagmatic phenomena of contextual allomorphy.
A language-specific investigation thus claims a broader theoretical significance as an
exploration of the interconnected workings of syntax, morphology, and semantics.
1.
INTRODUCTION
Published as: Acquaviva, Paolo. 2014. The Categories of Modern Irish Verbal
Inflection. Journal of Linguistics 50:537-586.
2
An inflectional paradigm groups together word forms specified for a range of values,
across a number of dimensions, relevant to a particular word class. In the search for
general principles of paradigm structure, significant questions concern languageparticular categories: whether they are primitive or can be broken down into features,
whether they are purely formal or have semantic content, how directly morphological
contrasts match semantic oppositions. In what follows, I ask these questions about Irish
verb inflection. I propose, firstly, a featural analysis of finite verb morphology;
secondly, a semantic characterization for the tenses defined in this system; thirdly, and
most importantly, a constructional syntactic account that relates the two in a principled
way, and unifies the explanation for the paradigmatic structure of the system and for the
syntagmatic effects on verb forms when they appear in certain contexts. This connects a
long tradition of studies on the structure of Irish verbal inflection (Wagner 1959;
Wigger 1972; Ó Siadhail & Wigger 1983; Ó Siadhail 1989; Ó Sé 1991, 2001) to a
significant body of research on Irish syntax as an instantiation of universal grammar.
The goal is a unified analysis of an intricate nexus of syntactic, morphological, and
semantic facts. The analytic tools of Minimalist syntax and Distributed Morphology are
deployed in an account where syntax constructs paradigmatic space and determines key
aspects of tense semantics, while morphology manipulates and interprets a syntactic
output imposing its own categorizations and language-particular constraints. The
purpose is not to dissolve morphological and semantic categories in syntax, but to put
forward an explicit theory of how the three interact in a given empirical domain. The
article outlines the general properties of Irish conjugation in Sections 2 and 3, then lays
out the theoretical context and the constructional approach guiding the analysis (Section
4), and derives the morphological and semantic properties of the contrasting classes
3
from three features: [Future] in Section 5, [Past] in Section 6, and, after a closer analysis
of the semantics of Irish tenses (Section 7), [Completive] in Section 8.
2.
OVERVIEW OF THE SYSTEM
2.1 Agreement and pronominal endings
Irish verbs have pronominal endings keyed to the features of the subject argument, so
that every finite paradigm (except the imperative) consists of the familiar six person–
number combinations, plus an impersonal form (for example, óltar ‘One drinks/People
drink’). However, only a few combinations, including all impersonal forms, have a
dedicated inflected form, like d’óltá ‘You used to drink’ (past habitual, 2sg). In contrast
with these SYNTHETIC forms, most forms are ANALYTIC: they do not express
person/number, but only tense/ mood, while the subject appears separately as a personal
pronoun or a full DP; for example, d’ól mé, d’ól tú, d’ól sé ‘I/You/He drank’ (simple
past). A characteristic trait of this system is that there is no concord between subjects
and pronominal endings, but complementarity. This means that, if the subject argument
is pronominal, it is obligatorily realized through the ending of a synthetic form, if one is
available, and only through it; otherwise an analytic form is used (see McCloskey &
Hale 1984, Doyle 2002). Significant dialectal variation affects the distribution of
synthetic and analytic forms over paradigms, and, as Doyle (2001: 41) points out, the
official standard is in fact a conventional compromise which ‘does not correspond to the
usage of any one dialect’.2 It will be used here to illustrate morphological and semantic
properties which are claimed to generalize across the dialectal spectrum, with explicit
mention of dialectal phenomena when they impinge on the overall analysis.
2.2 Lenition, nasalization, and preverbal particles
4
Irish finite clauses are uniformly VSO, whether root or embedded. Arguments and
adverbs may be fronted before the verb, without effect on verbal morphology. By
contrast, clause-initial particles proclitic to a verb affect its left edge according to the
two patterns of initial mutation traditionally called lenition (séimhiú) and nasalization
(úrú). For example, the initial stop of the stem buail- [buǝl´] ‘to hit’ is realized as [w]
when lenited by the past question particle ar in Ar bhuail tú [ǝr 'wuǝl´ tu] ‘Did you
hit?’; and it surfaces as [m] after the nasalizing present question particle an in the
sequence an mbualann tú [ǝ 'muǝlǝn tu] ‘Do you hit?’ (in phonetic and phonemic
transcriptions, the symbol ´ marks palatalization on a preceding consonant)). While the
relation between verbs and particles is a central concern of this paper, the phonological
reflexes of embedding verbs into a verbal complex are irrelevant for an account of Irish
conjugation, and will therefore be ignored here.
2.3 The array of tenses and moods
Traditional descriptions distinguish three moods (indicative, conditional, imperative)
and four tenses (past, habitual past, present, future). In addition, a subjunctive mood
exists, which is moribund today except in optative set phrases. Only the indicative
distinguishes the full array of tenses, and imperative and conditional have no tense
distinctions at all. The result is a heavily imbalanced system, where tense oppositions
are marginal or absent in moods other than the indicative, as schematized in (1).3
(1)
Present indicative
Simple past indicative
Past habitual indicative
Future indicative
Conditional
Imperative (Present subjunctive)
(Past subjunctive)
5
As tense and mood oppositions do not in fact cross-classify, in what follows I will refer
to each category in (1) as a tense, and drop the label ‘indicative’.4 As a first illustration,
consider the analytic form of bris ‘to break’ in each tense, with the orthographic form
followed by a broad transcription based on the Western Connacht dialect:5
(2) Present
briseann
/b´r´iʃəɴ/
Simple past
bhris
/v´r´iʃ/
Past habitual
bhriseadh
/b´r´iʃəx/
Future
brisfidh
/b´r´iʃhə/
Subjunctive
brise
/b´r´iʃə/
Conditional
bhrisfeadh
/v´r´iʃhə/
Imperative
bris
/b´r´iʃ/
The forms beginning with orthographic bh- display lenition of the initial consonant, in
this case turning /b/ into /v/ (the initial br- cluster is palatal; for a non-palatal /b/, the
outcome of lenition would be /w/). With vowel-initial stems, a prefix d- appears instead:
ÓL ‘TO DRINK’
BRIS ‘TO BREAK’
Present indicative
ólann
briseann
Past indicative
d’ól
bhris
Past habitual indicative
d’óladh
bhriseadh
Conditional
d’ólfadh
bhrisfeadh
(3)
Historically, the marker was uniformly do, which triggered lenition on a following
consonant: ól- → d’ól, bris- → do bhris (a state of affairs preserved until recently in
conservative dialects and registers). As lenited f- reduces to zero, f-initial verb stems
display both lenition and do-prefixation: fág- ‘leave’ → d’fhág ‘left’ (see Section 6.2
below). The functional equivalence of lenition and do-prefixation suggests viewing
6
them as contextually determined allomorphs of the same morpheme, which I will notate
DO from now on.
The orthographic -f- of future and conditional similarly stands for a variety of
dialectal realizations, ranging from zero to /f/ (Ó Sé 1991: 68–75). In addition, beside /f/
and its realizations, a large class of verbs displays a sharply different future suffix /oː/:
(4)
Future
CLASS 1
CLASS 2
fág ‘to leave’
inis ‘to tell’
fágfaidh
inseóidh /inʃoːɪ/
/fɑːkhɪ/
Conditional d’fhágfadh /dɑːkhəx/
d’inseódh /d´inʃoːx/
The two patterns are traditionally called ‘conjugations’, which is slightly misleading
because they only differ in the realization of the future stem (in the future and
conditional); but this term captures the lexically governed nature of this alternation. The
first conjugation groups together verbs whose root has a CVC phonological structure,
like mol, while the second usually characterizes verbs with CVC(V)C roots like
ceangail ‘to bind’, inis ‘to tell’, seachain ‘to avoid’. More precisely, to anticipate the
discussion in Section 5, verbs in the second conjugation regularly give rise to (at least)
bisyllabic forms. This happens either through insertion of a supporting schwa to break
an illicit final -CC cluster when no ending follows (2sg imperative bare root seachain
/ʃaxən´/, CVCəC), or through a distinctive long vowel between root and ending, which
is generally palatal (as in the present indicative seachn-aí-onn /ʃaxn-iː-ɴ/) but is /oː/ in
the future stem (e.g. conditional sheachn-ódh /ʃaxn-oː-x/). Regardless of whether this
alternation is entirely analysable phonologically, as argued by Ó Siadhail (1989: 170), it
shows that the choice of future suffix locally depends on the shape of the verb stem, a
point to which I will return in sections 5.1 and 5.2.
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2.4 Nominal verb forms and periphrases
Irish verbs also have two non-finite forms, the verbal noun (e.g. léamh ‘to read,
reading’, from léigh) and the verbal adjective (e.g. léite ‘read’). They do not inflect for
tense or mood, and are classified as nominal because their morphology and their casemarking properties match those of nouns and participial adjectives (partially, since
direct objects of verbal nouns are no longer genitive in colloquial speech).The verbal
noun is widely used with an infinitive-like function to express complement and
adverbial clauses, as illustrated in (5).
(5)
Tá áthas orm
is joy
tú
on.1SG 2SG
a
bheith
ag foghlaim
Gaeilge.
PRT
be.VN
at learn.VN
Irish
‘I am glad that you are learning Irish.’
The verbal adjective is a participial form with widespread use in periphrases like the
perfective Tá an leabhar léite ag Eoin ‘Eoin has read the book’, lit.: ‘the book is read at
Eoin’. Another periphrasis, with progressive value, is the phrase ag foghlaim ‘at
learning’ in (5). This illustrates the use of both nominal forms in progressive, perfective,
and prospective aspectual periphrases with the existential verb, in tandem with
prepositions, or more limitedly with light verbs like déan ‘to do’ and cuir ‘to put’ (for
more details, see Ó Siadhail 1989: 294–302; Doyle 2001: 68–75). Although aspectual
periphrases contribute essentially to the range of temporal-aspectual categories in the
system, I will not consider them in what follows, as the focus of this investigation is the
inflectional morphology of finite verb forms.6
2.5 Two verbs ‘to be’
The existential verb bí patterns like every other lexical verb in its morphology and
syntax, except for being the only verb with a distinct habitual form in the present. A
8
second verb translating the English ‘to be’, traditionally called the copula, is quite
different. It expresses only individual-level predications, where the truth is not
evaluated relative to a time interval; more importantly for present purposes, it lies
outside the system of verb morphology. Instead of the tenses and moods in (1), the
copula shows a single opposition between a present form and a non-present one
interpreted as past or conditional.7 Besides, it lacks personal endings (including the
autonomous form) and non-finite forms. Finally, in subordinate contexts it is fused with
complementizers. Unsurprisingly, it is generally viewed as a spellout of Tense/Aspect
features rather than as a lexical verb (Carnie 1995, Duffield 1995, Doherty 1996).
2.6 Recapitulation and explananda
We can schematize as follows the structure of the tense stems of lexical verbs, letting
DO stand for lenition and/or do-prefixation, and F for the realizations of the future
suffix:8
(6)
Present
briseann
ROOT–ending
Simple past
bhris
DO–ROOT
Past habitual
bhriseadh
DO–ROOT–ending
Future
brisfidh
ROOT–F–ending
(Subjunctive)
brise
ROOT–ending
Conditional
bhrisfeadh
DO–ROOT–F–ending
Imperative (2sg)
bris
ROOT
Imperative (2pl)
brisigí
ROOT–ending
There are several reasons why a list like (6) is only the point of departure, and cannot
truly represent all that speakers know about the organization of the Irish verb system.
First, tense markers distribute across tenses. For example, in the conditional, the
stem suffixes are those of the future; the personal endings are instead shared with the
9
past habitual and the past subjunctive; and the prefixal past DO aligns the conditional
with the indicative past and past habitual, as well as the past subjunctive where this is
still present. Second, preverbal particles are also marked for tense, and their patterns of
co-occurrence with verb morphology provide another source of paradigmatic
alignments. Conditional, past, habitual past, and past subjunctive have all the past prefix
DO; but after a preverbal particle, as we will see (Section 8.6), only the simple past
replaces DO with a suffix -r enclitic on the particle (e.g. d’ith – gu-r ith ‘ate’ – ‘that
ate’). Third, (6) above says nothing about how the various tenses and markers relate to
meaning. Two questions arise in this respect: What semantic value or range of values
can be attributed to tenses? and What is the semantic contribution of individual
morphemes? For example, the ‘past’ element of the conditional cannot mean just
‘anterior to utterance time’, as it co-occurs with a future marker and selects the non-past
form on a preceding particle. Fourth, the copula has an extremely reduced inflection. If
the features defining the various tenses are hosted in a Tense head, and the copula
realizes the same head, its defective paradigm is accidental and unrelated to any other
property of inflectional system. Finally, as we will see in the next section, the paradigms
of irregular verbs respect systematic generalizations. If these occur even with verbs with
unpredictable forms, it is likely that they derive from deeper organizational principles.
3.
ROOT ALLOMORPHY AND SUPPLETION
3.1 Tense root allomorphs
A small class of irregular verbs have unpredictable root allomorphy keyed to the choice
of tense/mood (never person/number). The allomorphs can differ from the regular base
as little as íos from ith for ‘to eat’ (/iːs/ – /ɪ/ ) or as much as rach from té for ‘to go’
10
(/rax/ – /teː/). Table 1 presents the distribution of allomorphs across tenses in the
standard variety.
abair ‘to say’
beir ‘to bear’
bí ‘to be’
clois ‘to hear’
déan ‘to do’
faigh ‘to get’
feic ‘to see’
ith ‘to eat’
tabhair ‘to give’
tar ‘to come’
téigh ‘to go’
Future/
conditional
déar
béar
be
Imperative
Present
abr
Past
habitual
deir
dúr
rug
beir
bí (present non-hab: tá)
clois
déan
gheobh
chuala
rinne
fuair
chonaic
faigh
feic
íos
tabhar
tioc
rach
Simple past
ith
tabhair
tar (2sg)
tug
tag
té
Table 1
Distribution of root allomorphs by tense in the standard dialect.
tháinig
chuaigh
As can be seen, each verb associates root allomorphs and tenses in a different way.
However, there are some clear distributional tendencies, the most obvious being that
future and conditional always share the same form. A closer view reveals the following
generalizations:
(7) (a) If a root form expresses past, it is used for the simple past and for no other
tenses.
(b) The root form used for the conditional always coincides with the root used for
the future plus the regular past marker; it is never the past root plus a regular
future marker, nor a specific conditional form different from both past and
future ones.
(c) No verb has a special root form for the past habitual.
The formulation in (7a) states that root allomorphs like chonaic ‘saw’ are not
generically past, but express specifically the simple past tense and not the conditional or
11
the past habitual, even though these involve past morphology. In other words, either a
root is not limited to tenses marked by past morphology or it specifically expresses the
simple past.
The generalization in (7b) is only in part a consequence of (7a). The conditional
has both past and future marking; when it is irregular, its constituency is always [DO
[future–root]], never *[[past–root] future]. This is expected, given that there is no [past–
root] outside of the simple past tense; but (7b) also rules out a special conditional root
distinct both from the one used in the simple past AND from that used in the future.
There is, then, no specifically conditional root form nor a specifically future one distinct
from the conditional.
Finally, (7c) states that there appear to be no specifically past habitual roots. This
does not follow from (7a), which would be compatible with a past habitual root distinct
from a simple past one. The generalization is not that the past habitual is always regular,
as Ulster varieties suggest it may not be (see Hughes 1994: 647–654; Ó Baoill 1996:
36–55), but that it never uses a stem specific to that tense and to no other one.
3.2 Syntactically dependent root allomorphs
Some irregular verbs select root allomorphs in a specific set of syntactic contexts.
Traditionally, these are called dependent forms, since they appear after subordinators
(declarative, relative, negative, or interrogative particles). An example is the verb ‘to
do’; (8a) below shows that its present forms are all built on the (default) root déan-,
regardless of their syntactic context, while the past tense, in (8b), distinguishes an
independent form rinne and a dependent dearna, which shows the initial mutations
induced by the subordinating particles.
(8)
(a)
déan-
Déanann sé
‘He does.’
12
(b)
Go ndéanann sé
‘that he does’
An ndéanann sé?
‘Does he do?’
rinne
Rinne sé
‘He did.’
dearna
An ndearna sé?
‘Did he do?’
Ní dhearna sé
‘He didn’t do.’
Sílim go ndearna sé ‘I think that he did.’
Table 2 lists the dependent forms of in the standard dialect; note that they are always
preceded by mutation-inducing particles. The highly idiosyncratic verb ‘to be’ also has
a negative non-past form níl, where the negative particle ní and a stem fuil coalesce.
Tense root allomorphs
Dependent
(verbal noun in brackets)
root allomorphs
‘to say’
abair, deir, déar, dúr, dúirt (rá)
‘to be’
bí, tá, beidh
fuil, raibh
‘to carry’
beir, béar, rug
‘to hear’
clois/cluin, chuala
‘to do’
déan, rinne/dhein
dearna
‘to get’
faigh, gheobh, fuair (fáil)
faighid
‘to see’
feic, chonaic
faca
‘to eat’
ith, íos
‘to give’
tabhair, tug
‘to come’ tar, tag, tioc, tháinig (teacht)
‘to go’
té, rachaidh, chuaigh (dul)
deachaigh
Table 2
Irregular verbs with a special root allomorph for dependent contexts.
The most obvious fact emerging from Table 2 is that the verbs with a dependent root
allomorph are a subset of those with a Tense allomorph. This is true, as far as I know, of
all varieties of Modern Irish. Note that this does not mean that, circularly, verbs with a
dependent root are irregular, but that one type of allomorphy is conditional on the other.
Although the pedagogical habit of presenting dependent forms as special cases of
irregular verbs gives the impression that dependent allomorphy is an extreme form of
13
irregularity, verbs with dependent allomorphs are not necessarily the most irregular
ones: in the standard, the verb feic has one tense-specific root and one dependent one,
while abair has no fewer than four different tense-specific root (déar, abr, deir, dúr) yet
it lacks a dependent one.9
Not all syntactically dependent contexts trigger root allomorphy and replace DOprefixation in the past with a special simple past allomorph. Remarkably, the same
subordinating contexts (má ‘if’, the so-called direct relative particle a, the causal
conjunctions ó, arae and mar ‘because’, and ó in the temporal sense of ‘since’) fail to
behave as dependent for both phenomena. This familiar correlation is evidently a
regularity that must be captured as a property of Irish grammar.
In sum, dependent allomorphy exhibits the following generalizations:
(9)
(a)
Only verbs with Tense root allomorphs have dependent root allomorphs.
(b)
The same subordinators fail to define a dependent context for the purposes
of root allomorphy and of the exponence of the simple past.
A satisfactory analysis of Irish verbal inflection should derive the generalizations in (7)
and (9) by the same set of assumptions and hypotheses needed to model the system of
tenses in (1) in terms of a set of morphological and semantic features; it should also
cover the difference between lexical verbs and the copula, and the role of preverbal
particles in the morphology of verb stems. This is the goal of the following sections.
4.
THEORETICAL ASSUMPTIONS
4.1 The syntactic construction of tenses
The approach I will explore is constructional in two ways. Firstly, on the paradigmatic
axis, it treats a tense (as a paradigmatic category, like ‘conditional’ or ‘past habitual’) as
a construction arising from grammatical morphemes specified for Tense (as a
14
grammatical category represented in syntax). Secondly, on the syntagmatic axis, the
interpretation of a tense arises not just from the morphemes it contains, but also from
the way they are combined; specifically, from their syntactic arrangement in the clause.
This agrees with the intuition that the temporal interpretation defined by a tense like
future or past habitual is a property of a clause and not of a verbal form, and fits
naturally with the observation that Tense morphemes are semantically underspecified
but not meaningless. Iatridou (2000: 245) programmatically illustrates this perspective
in her analysis of ‘past’ morphemes:
In other words, what we call the ‘past tense morpheme’ has a meaning σ such that
in certain environments E1, σ receives a temporal past interpretation and in certain
other environments E2 it receives a different one. Under this approach the
meaning of temporal past is not a primitive but derives from σ in combination
with other interpretive elements of E1.
So, to understand the values of individual Irish tenses, their semantic and morphological
constituency, and their mutual relations, we must understand how Tense is expressed in
general and in the Irish clause in particular.
Following Demirdache & Uribe-Etxebarria (2000), Stowell (2007), and
Mezhevich (2008), I view Tense and Aspect as syntactic heads (T(ense) and Asp(ect))
interpreted as two-place relations between temporal arguments. The two elements are
distinguished by the arguments they apply to and not by the relation itself, which in
both cases specifies whether the two arguments overlap. This gives a syntactic
execution to an approach extensively argued for in previous literature (see especially
Smith 1991, Klein 1995, Iatridou 2000), which focuses on the topological property of
15
coincidence between intervals as the linchpin of manifold interpretive phenomena.
Aspect is what we call the relation between the Event Time (the interval occupied by
the event denoted by the verbal predicate) and the Assertion Time, understood as the
interval about which the clause makes an assertion (cf. the notion of ‘event frame’ in
Chung & Timberlake 1985, and Binnick 1991: 211–212 for its relation to the
Reichenbachian Reference Time). For example, in the imperfective Anna was walking,
the Assertion Time is properly included in the Event Time (the duration of the walking
event), while the two do not overlap in the perfect Anna has walked.10 On the other
hand, Tense relates the Assertion Time to the Utterance Time and so locates the event in
time by qualifying the overlap, if any, between the time about which the assertion is
made and the deictic ‘now’ provided by the Utterance Time. Aspect qualifies the
viewpoint on the event, and Tense its relation with the time of utterance, but both
express the coincidence or lack of coincidence between two temporally extended
regions.
The approach adopted here models the structure just outlined in syntactic terms:
Tense and Aspect are heads, projecting a Tense Phrase (TP) and an Aspect Phrase
(AspP), nested into one another as part of a larger clausal structure. As in Demirdache
& Uribe-Etxebarria (2000) and Mezhevich (2008), the model followed here is the
Minimalist framework, outlined in Chomsky (1995, 2001) and articulated in much later
work. Specifically, three sets of assumptions guide the analysis: about the Irish clausal
structure, about grammatical features in this structure, and about the relation between
syntax and morphology. Let us consider them in turn.
4.2 The syntax of the Irish clause
16
For our purposes, a finite Irish clause with a lexical verb has the structure in (10), with
Asp included for completeness even though, as we will see, it is morphologically
irrelevant:
(10)
CP
C
Polarity/FinitenessP
Pol/Fin
TP
T
AspP
Asp
vP
v
ROOT
No one head corresponds to the verb: I will replace the redundant notation v – V (for a
grammatical and a lexical verbal head) with v – ROOT, making explicit that being a verb
means for a lexical root to occur in a verbal environment, in particular one with the key
properties identified by the formal object notated as v (Marantz 1997, Borer 2005).
The relational approach I follow on Tense and Aspect, as well as cross-linguistic
evidence, suggests locating Aspect just above vP. This is also the likely location of
preposition-like particles involved in aspectual periphrases, like ag in the progressive
(McCloskey 1996, 2007: 847–851; Doyle 2002; Ó Donnchadha 2010 views this as the
locus of Voice). The syntactic projection of a head Asp does not entail that such a head
has a role in verbal morphology, however. While there is evidence for at least one head
between T and v (see McCloskey 2009), there is no evidence for a morpheme
corresponding to Asp in the make-up of INFLECTED verbal forms.11 In particular, we will
see in Section 8 that an aspectual characterization cannot be the content of ‘habitual’
morphology. The idea that Irish verbal inflection lacks an aspect morpheme also makes
it easier to understand why this category finds a periphrastic expression. I will therefore
17
ignore Asp in what follows, bearing in mind that the head is probably there in syntax,
but it has no role in shaping the form of finite verbs.
Going up the tree in (10), T and Pol(arity)/Fin(iteness) articulate the expression
of Tense and Polarity across two heads. Justification for this split is not immediately
evident, and cannot rest on considerations of word order and clitic placement, given the
clustering of bound morphemes into a single verb complex in Irish. However,
arguments for distinct heads below C have emerged repeatedly in the literature
(Guilfoyle 1990, 2000; Duffield 1995; Doherty 1996; McCloskey 1996; Doyle 2002). In
particular, McCloskey (2010) has shown that sentences like the attested (11) make a
strong case for locating negation and C on distinct heads, despite their morphological
fusion into negative particles like ní or mura:
(11)
Mur
dtéighinn
agus iad
if.NEG go.CONDIT.1SG and
cailleadh, mhuirbhfeadh
3PL lose.VN
kill.CONDIT
siad mé
3PL 1SG
‘If I were not to go and they were to lose, they would kill me.’
Negation here is expressed on the subordinating conjunction mur which takes both
conjuncts in its scope; however, what is negated is the first conjunct only, ‘if [it were
not the case that I go] and [it were the case that they lose]’.12 This suggests that negation
is interpreted on the first conjunct, but gets morphologically realized on the
complementizer on its left, as mur:
(12)
CP
C
X
[NEG-clause1]
and
[clause2]
18
Accordingly, McCloskey (2010) concludes that negation originates and is interpreted in
a Pol head between C and T; the conjuncts joined by and in (12) are Polarity Phrases,
the first of which is negative. Crucially, this means that a complete finite clause is not a
TP, but a PolP, and that the finite verb raises not just up to T but to Pol. McCloskey
(2010) also shows that negation in this syntactic locus characterizes non-finite
environments too. In finite clauses, however, this head encodes negation and hosts the
finite verb; it is plausible to relate it (or to identify it, more dubitatively) with the head
Finiteness, which Rizzi (1997) posited as higher than T but lower than C, at the lower
end of the left periphery (see Ó Donnchadha 2010). As for this latter area, I will follow
McCloskey (1996, 2001) in assuming C as a unique syntactic position for clause-initial
particles (contrast Duffield 1995: 73). Particles in C may be further embedded under a
preposition-like element, as in cé go ‘although that’, sul-a ‘before’, dialectally also sulmá (McCloskey 2001: 84).
4.3 Tense features in the clause
The expression of negation (and Tense) on C illustrates our second set of theoretical
assumptions, concerning the representation of grammatical features. A form like nach,
the negative version of the declarative non-past subordinator go, expresses negation on
C, but as we have seen, the locus of negation is arguably below C. Of course nach, like
go, also expresses finiteness; and if finiteness has a dedicated syntactic locus below C, it
is another example of grammatical information being expressed on one head in syntax
but manifested on a higher head. Thus, grammatical features have distinct syntactic loci,
one relevant for semantic interpretation, the other for morphological realization (see
McCloskey (1996: 86–96) for arguments that negation actually includes in its scope
adjoined phrases above its position as a proclitic to the verbal complex). The framework
19
adopted here models this mismatch in terms of feature interpretability on heads: in the
case at hand, we will say that negation is a feature of Pol, where it is semantically
interpreted, but it is also a feature of the higher head C. On C, however, negation is a
purely formal feature, defined in terms of grammar alone and uninterpretable outside of
the formal system that we call syntax – and of its morphological realization. In other
cases the mismatch is reversed: assuming that Tense is interpreted on T, a Tense marker
that arguably originates on the verb stem itself will appear on a head in vP as an
uninterpretable feature, but will be interpreted on T. Two heads in this kind of relation
must then agree in a feature, in the precise sense that both are formally marked for it and
the value specified on one of the heads is copied on the other, in the feature unification
relation formally defined as Agree (Chomsky 2001). Much subsequent work is based on
this way to interpret the basic relation between syntactic objects. Roberts (2010), in
particular, analyses many phenomena in terms of syntactic head movement. I will
instead focus on feature displacement that is defined over syntax but concerns
morphology, as the discussion of negation above illustrates (McCloskey notes that the
relation between negation and C in (12) must be left-conjunct agreement and not
movement, since it is not generally possible to move an element from inside one
conjunct only). If feature agreement between heads is less constrained than head
movement, it has a broader (but still explanatory) empirical application. Apart from
cases like (11), it accounts for cases where the same form licenses the interpretation of
two categories on distinct heads, as where perfect morphology expresses perfect Aspect
and past Tense: in such cases, as Mezhevich (2008) argues for Russian, the values for
the features [Perfective] and [Past] are both associated with perfective morphology on
the verb, and they are copied (valued) on the heads Asp and T in turn.
20
4.4 Syntax and morphology
A third set of assumptions concerns morphology as a grammatical subsystem. I follow a
model of the architecture of grammar which includes morphology as a post-syntactic
component distinct from both from syntax and from phonology. As in the item-andarrangement approach known as Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993,
Marantz 1997, Embick & Marantz 2008), what is called morphology here is a map from
abstract syntactic structures to phonologically interpreted strings, which may change
syntactic constituency under (more or less strict) constraints but as a default case
respects it. The map to phonology takes place via Vocabulary Insertion, which realizes
an input grammatical content as an output phonological exponent. Importantly, the postsyntactic operations that prepare the map to phonology constitute a grammatical
component, rather than a series of readjustments. In particular, I envisage purely
morphological entities like DO, which define more than one spellout but are referenced
by morphological rules as single grammatical entities (Embick 2010: 90–91 introduces
a similar element in his analysis of French determiners, realizing the same [masculine
definite] morpheme as different vocalic endings in du and des).
One of the most obvious deviations from syntactic constituency, and the most
relevant here, is Fusion, whereby two syntactic terminals are realized as a single
position of exponence. Halle & Marantz (1993: 136) exemplify Fusion with the widely
attested coalescence of person and number, adding that it applies to sister nodes, turning
them into a single position of exponence. I analyse Irish tense-sensitive root allomorphs
as fused morphemes realizing a lexical root along with some grammatical specification:
verbality, a Tense marker, and, for dependent allomorphs, a contextual restriction. But
Fusion, to be a serviceable analytic tool, cannot affect just any two features anywhere in
21
the syntactic tree; it must be local. My claim is that, if Tense markers occupy certain
syntactic positions, the locality of Fusion explains why only certain root allomorphs
exist and not others.
5.
[FUTURE]
5.1 The structural representation of [Future]
Irish future and past markers differ in a number of ways:
•
While the realization of the past marker DO is uniformly determined for all verbs
on phonological bases, the realization of the future marker F partitions verbs into
two classes, characterized by an /f/ or /oː/ suffix (the former variously realized).
•
There exist suppletive roots for the tenses marked by [Future] (future and
conditional), but not for the tenses marked by [Past], that is, for ALL forms so
marked and not just for the simple past; recall the generalizations in (7) above.
•
Past morphology is prefixal, future morphology is suffixal.
•
Future marking only applies to lexical verbs, while the past/non-past opposition
extends to the copula as well.
We can account for these asymmetries in a unified way by hypothesizing different
structural representations for the features [Future] and [Past]. Instead of taking verbal
forms to enter syntax already equipped with morphological features, our analysis
follows the guiding idea that inflected forms spell out structures where features are
properties of grammatical heads. Specifically, if verbs consist of a root in a verbal
environment, [Future] can be attributed to v, where the suffixal pattern of [Future]
exponence reflects the raising of the root to v:
22
(13)
vP
v
ROOT
t
v[Future]
Being the lowest grammatical head, v is immediately local to the root when this raises.
In the complex head that results, the exponence of [Future] on v can then depend on the
root, linearly and structurally adjacent, as a normal instance of contextual allomorphy. If
[Past] originates on a higher head, instead of being another possible value of v, the four
differences summarized above can be traced back to the fact that [Future] is closer to
the root:
• The exponence of future can depend on the root because [Future] is adjacent to
the root; past morphology is more peripheral.
• Past morphology CAN be fused with a root in simple past root allomorphs, but
locality (see discussion in Sections 6.4 and 8.4) prevents Fusion from applying to
a root, a feature on a node X, and a second feature on a higher node Y; this rules
out a specifically conditional root allomorph (which would be [Past [Future
ROOT]]).
• A different structural position for [Past] and [Future] does not make it necessary
that they differ in affixal status, but it makes it possible, and more plausible than
if they were alternative markings of the same head.
• The consensus analysis views the copula as a grammatical morpheme realizing
Tense, not as a lexical verb; if [Future] is a feature of v, and v only appears with
23
lexical verbs, the absence of this feature from the paradigm of the copula is not
accidental. [Past] must then appear on a higher head.13
The order [Past [Future ROOT]], then, is at the very least compatible with the data. It
also coincides with the order shown by French and Romance conditionals (Iatridou
2000: 267 n. 41), where the exponent of future occurs inside the word-edge past
endings: attend-r-ions ‘we would wait’. If the order of morphemes reflects the order of
the syntactic heads where they originate, this is what one would expect.
5.2 The exponence of [Future]
As Wigger (1972: 206–207) recognized, the traditional two conjugations are not
different verbal paradigms, but rather correspond to a lexical opposition in the shape of
stems, which conditions the choice of future suffixes (see Ó Sé 1991: 77). As
anticipated in Section 2, first-conjugation verbs have a CVC root, suffixed in the future
by /f/ (shorthand for various realizations), while in second-conjugation verbs a palatal
suffix intervenes between the root and all inflectional endings; in the future, this suffix
is replaced by /oː/. To illustrate the variation in stem shape in the second conjugation,
consider that the root extension appears as /iː/ in the present ceangl-aí-onn /k´angl´-iːəN/ ‘binds’, but as /oː/ in the future ceangl-ó-idh /k´angl-oː-j/ ‘will bind’ (and in the
conditional cheangl-ó-dh /k´angl-oː-x/), in contrast to the /f/ of first-conjugation verbs
like mol-f-idh ‘will praise’ (Ó Siadhail & Wigger 1983: 53–55; Ó Siadhail 1989: 170–
173).14
Membership in the second conjugation is phonologically motivated, since a root
longer than CVC will necessarily belong here (for instance, ceangail ‘bind’, CVCCəC).
However, many second-conjugation verbs have a simple CVC root, like bail- ‘gather’,
present bailíonn. In particular, verbalizations of ‘short’ words regularly belong to the
24
second conjugation, since they add a palatal suffix to a monosyllabic root, like ard
(verbal noun ardaigh) ‘to raise’, transparently derived from the adjective ard ‘high’. As
Ó Sé (1991: 65) notes, facts like this show that the split between the two classes is
prosodic in nature, and takes place at the level of stem, not of root: the purpose of
second-conjugation root extension ‘seems to be the fulfilment of a constraint that the
shortest occurring 2nd Conj. form be at least two syllables long’. This means that it is
not the phonological form of the root which deterministically decides the conjugation of
a verb; on the contrary, belonging to the second conjugation is a lexical property, which
takes the form of a prosodic constraint on output forms.15 This lexical marking has an
obvious phonological motivation, as most second-conjugation verbs have a root longer
than CVC, and so it is not totally arbitrary; but the shape of the root by itself is not
decisive. Verbs like bail ‘to gather’ regularly belong here despite their CVC root. More
strikingly, some verbs display oscillation between the two conjugations, most notably
the very common labhair /lawr´/ ‘to speak’ which appears both as Labhraíonn sé and
Labhrann sé ‘he speaks’ (see De Bhaldraithe 1977 [1953]: 176, n. 1; Ó Siadhail 1989:
173–174; Ó Sé 2000: 270–271). And when a verb is derived by extending a CVC root
which exists independently as a lexical word, it will fall into the same conjugation
because of the shape of the verbal stem, not of the root.
In sum, over and above the phonological variation of the second-conjugation root
extension, verbs of the two classes have the following structure (ignoring the 2sg
imperative, realized as root+extension /iː/ for verbs like bail and as a bare root
elsewhere):
(14) (a) First conjugation:
ROOT – /f/ – ENDINGS
(future)
ROOT – ENDINGS
(all other tenses)
25
(b) Second conjugation:
ROOT – /oː/ – ENDINGS
(future)
ROOT – /iː/
(all other tenses)
– ENDINGS
The question that arises is how the morphological structures in (14) derive from the
syntactic structure in (13). Given that the second-conjugation root extensions /iː/ and /oː/
never co-occur, it seems natural to think of them as alternative realizations of the same
position of exponence, which (10) and (13) suggest may be v. In one case, this position
of exponence co-occurs with a separate future morpheme: this happens in the
impersonal, as illustrated by the future ceangl-ó-f-ar ‘one will bind’ and the conditional
cheangl-ó-f-aí ‘one would bind’. Apart from occurring alongside the future marker /oː/,
this impersonal -f- morpheme is normally realized as /f/, in contrast with the variable
realizations of the future marker of first-conjugation forms like molfaidh ‘will praise’
(see Section 2.3 above), so it is clearly a distinct exponent. This seems to suggest a
greater internal complexity for second-conjugation verbs.16
A previous version of this paper hypothesized that second-conjugation verbs have
a complex root, extended by an augment normally realized as the suffix /iː/ and
obligatorily fused with a [Future] v head, which would then be spelled out as /oː/.17 But
that solution does not account for suffixless imperatives like ceangail; in addition, the
posited Fusion of the root augment and v [Future] (necessarily involving lowering of v)
has no independent motivation, and in any case would require additional assumptions
about the impersonal forms in -ó-f-ar as well as the Donegal cases mentioned in
footnote 16 (because in neither case do the two future suffixes appear as /iː/ and /f/).
Above all, a complex root structure for second conjugation would fail to capture the
OUTPUT constraint
which is operative on all second-conjugation verb forms.
26
A more promising approach places this constraint at the heart of the analysis.
What must be at least two syllables long is in any case a VERBAL form, whether it is a
bare root like ceangail or a complex one like bail-igh, that is, /bal´ + iː/. Suppose, then,
that the locus for this constraint is also the locus of verbality, namely v. This head
constrains the output of the category it derives, very much like the prosodic templates of
Semitic binyanim, which Arad (2005) likewise treats as encoded on v.18 Let us notate a
v head with this value ‘v-σσ’. This move gives us an independent basis for
distinguishing two types of v, which can receive different realizations. In the (default)
first conjugation, v defines no spellout. Roots associated with ‘v-σσ’, on the other hand,
correspond to verbal structure lexically marked as subject to the two-syllables constraint
of Ó Sé (1991) (see Section 5.2. above). The standard assumption that realization
proceeds from the deepest element outwards gives the right result, namely that the
spellout of v depends on that of the root. Specifically, v-σσ will appear as zero if the
root is already bisyllabic (or better, if it has a CVCC structure with an appropriate coda
cluster), and as /iː/ elsewhere:
(15) (a) v-σσ ↔ Ø
/ ROOT σσ ______
(b) v-σσ ↔ /iː/
We can now analyse the future suffix /oː/ as a grammatically conditioned alternant
realization of the same head, contrasting with the /f/ which spells out the default v:
(16) (a) v-σσ [Future] ↔ /oː/
(b) v [Future]
↔ /f/ (realized as /f/ or /h/)
27
As noted, the /f/ of impersonal forms cannot be equated with the default future marker,
both because of its form (always /f/) and its distribution (both conjugations). In Section
8 we will see that the /f/ of ceannó-f-ar actually belongs with other pre-endings, a fact
that would be obscured if we were to treat it as an extra future suffix.
In conclusion, future and conditional involve a feature [Future] associated with a
grammatical head in vP, occurring above a lexical root (hence, absent in the copula),
and structurally lower than the head expressing [Past]. This paves the way for an
analysis of inherently future stems as the spellout of roots fused with [Future]. Before
implementing this idea, we must make explicit the structural representation of [Past].
6.
[PAST]
6.1 Featural and notional past
Being ‘past’ means three distinct things in Irish verb inflection. First, notionally, past
forms signal that a predication holds before the speech time. This covers events proper,
habits, and states; in particular, individual-level predications expressed by the copula,
which attribute a permanent property to the subject. As Doherty (1996) showed, in a
past example like (17), this means that the subject has left the universe of discourse, not
that he is no longer a doctor:
(17) ba
COP.PST
dhochtúir Seán
doctor
(Doherty 1996: 39)
Seán
‘Seán was a doctor.’
In this sense, ‘past’ is a property of clausal predications.
Secondly, verbal forms are morphologically past if they involve a certain
marking, namely in the simple past, past habitual, and conditional. While past vs. nonpast is just one of the oppositions in the paradigm of lexical verbs, it is the only one for
28
the copula, which distinguishes a present IS from a past ba with past or counterfactual
value. Importantly, this formal opposition extends to preverbal particles. In this sense,
‘past’ is a morphosyntactic category, defined by an opposition in form with different
interpretive correlates.
Thirdly, the simple past tense is ‘past’ in a way that other DO-prefixed tenses are
not, as it is the only tense that triggers past particle alternants, like ní-or in (18b):19
(18) (a)
sí
D’fhan
PST.wait
(simple past, affirmative)
3SG.FEM
‘She waited.’
(b)
Ní-or
NEG-PST
fhan
sí
wait
(simple past, negative)
3SG.FEM
‘She did not wait.’
(19) (a)
D’fhan-adh
PST.wait-HAB
sí
(past habitual, affirmative)
3SG.FEM
‘She used to wait.’
(b)
Ní
fhan-adh
sí
(past habitual, negative)
NEG
wait-HAB 3SG.FEM
‘She used not to wait.’
(20) (a)
D’fhan-f-adh
PST.wait-F-HAB
sí
(conditional, affirmative)
3SG.FEM
‘She would wait.’
(b)
Ní
fhan-f-adh
sí
NEG
wait-F-HAB 3SG.FEM
(conditional, negative)
‘She would not wait.’
This point bears emphasizing, because the usual convention of glossing both d- and -r
as ‘past’ (a convention I have just followed) may give the impression that these forms
29
are suffixed by -r whenever the independent verb has DO. It is not so: as (19) and (20)
above illustrate, past habitual and conditional have DO on the verb but no -r on
particles. Only in the simple past do the two appear as complementary alternants of one
morpheme. If we want to call this morpheme ‘past’, we should distinguish a third sense
of this category as a property of a specific tense.20
Having cleared up potential ambiguities, we can now use a feature [Past] to model
the property of being past in the second of the three senses just distinguished. The other
two, namely the ‘before-now’ interpretation and the content of the simple past tense,
will be explicated in terms of how [Past] is interpreted in the context of a whole clause.
For the reasons outlined in the preceding sections, [Past] should originate in a
position higher than that of [Future], that is, higher than vP, so that it applies to the
copula as well as to lexical verbs. The head T suggests itself as the obvious location,
defined by its structural position and by its content. Structurally, T is the second-highest
functional head in root clauses; C, when present, is the second head above T, as in the
diagram in (10) above. Suppose, then, that T hosts the feature [Tense], with two
possible values: [Past], requiring explicit marking, and [Non-Past], an unmarked value
filled in automatically in the absence of [Past]. This is the content of T in a formal
sense, as grammatical information encapsulated in it. What this marking amounts to for
semantic interpretation will be made clearer in Section 7. Before that, it is necessary to
clarify how morphology interprets a [Past] marking on T.
Recall (from Section 4 above) that grammatical features can be interpreted on one
head but spelled out on another, like negation on C. Given the evidence for at least two
heads between the inflected verb and the head of VP (McCloskey 1996, 2001, 2009; Ó
30
Donnchadha 2010), I take tensed verbs to be spelled out not in T but in
Pol(arity)/Fin(iteness), one level up:
(21)
CP
C
Polarity/FinitenessP
Pol/Fin
TP
T
vP
v
ROOT
This means that the head Pol/Fin is also marked for the Tense feature. The value of this
feature is copied from T, where it is semantically interpreted. The realization of [Past]
thus takes place entirely above vP, which accounts for its salient properties: the category
is relevant for lexical verbs but also for the copula; and its exponence (unlike for
[Future]) is not sensitive to the choice of root, but can be sensitive to the immediately
superior head C.
6.2 The exponence of [Past]: DO
Pol/Fin is the head where the inflected verb is spelled out. This means, I assume, that it
hosts the raised complex made up of T, v, and the root. The outcome of syntactic headraising is shown in (22); from now on, I will represent Pol/Fin as Fin for simplicity:
(22)
FinP
Fin
TP
T
T
Fin
v
ROOT
v
31
The terminals of this representation are understood as abstract elements in the
computational system which we call syntax, not as morphological pieces; a head does
not ‘raise to pick up affixes’ (see Roberts 2010 for discussion). Besides, syntactic
terminals are not directly mapped to phonology, but to elements with morphological
properties like being a prefix, or determining a range of phonologically-chosen
alternants. In this mapping, Fusion and other operations may alter the one-to-one
relation between terminals and positions of exponence. Thus, the structure in (22) maps
to the linearized morphological representation in (23):
(23)
FinP
Fin
TP
T
Fin
T
v
ROOT
DO
v
STEM (ENDINGS)
Syntax determines the peripheral position of endings in the verbal complex because
they realize the head Fin to which the other heads are adjoined. These endings spell out
the person and number values of a subject argument if this does not have a separate
realization. Placing endings under Fin accounts for the fact that their realization depends
on tenses (like conditional), not just on features (like [Future]). This is possible because
Fin is a sister of the complex head T, and ‘sees’ all the information it contains. On the
other hand, that endings are not only peripheral but also suffixal, is a property of the
actual morphemes.
In at least one case, the content of Fin blocks the insertion of DO under T. As
McCloskey (2007) argues, impersonal endings are best analysed as the reflex of a
32
feature [Arb] (for ‘arbitrary reference’), an independently established category that
accounts for the semantic range of Irish impersonal forms. Like person/number features,
[Arb] is an uninterpretable feature on Fin, copied from the argument in subject position.
The fact of interest is that in the simple past, the impersonal form is incompatible with
an overt realization for DO, either as lenition or as prevocalic d-:21
(24) (a)
D’-fhan sé
(simple past, 3sg)
DO-wait 3SG
‘He waited.’
(b)
Fan-adh
(simple past, impersonal)
wait-IMPERS
‘One waited.’
The structural analysis in (23) makes it possible to treat this as a case of contextual
allomorphy: the marking of [Arb] on Fin inhibits the insertion of DO under T. Note that
v’s adjunction to T does not destroy the sisterhood relation between T and Fin as two
syntactic nodes, as distinct from positions of exponence.
A more obvious case in which the realization of T does not involve DO is that of
the copula. Recall that the copula has no endings, personal or impersonal. I assume that
it realizes T but none of the lower heads: aspect, person/number, and future are not
categories for it. Unlike in the previous case, then, here the lack of DO depends not on
the content of Fin but on the lack of a lexical root or a root-related v. Under current
syntactic assumptions, the adjunction of v to T is triggered by the presence of a vfeature on T. We then have a clear way to tell apart T-as-copula from T as part of a
lexical verb: only the latter has the uninterpretable feature [v], which triggers raising of
33
v (and what has attached to it). T is morphologically interpreted as DO only when it is
[Tense: Past] and [v]:
(25) T [v, Tense: Past] ↔ DO
Adding a requirement that T must be marked for pronominal features, but not [Arb],
would derive the lack of DO on past impersonal forms. Past copula forms realize
instead a [Past] T as the orthographic b(a) or bh’, phonologically /bə /, /b/, or /v/,
globally notated BA here:
(26) T [Tense: Past] ↔ BA
Let us finally concentrate on the exponence of DO. As we have seen, this has two
ingredients: initial lenition, for consonant-initial stems (as in bhris /v´r´iʃ/ ‘broke’), and
d-prefixation, for vowel-initial ones (as in d’ól /doːl/ ‘drank’). The fact that lenited /f/
becomes zero has non-trivial consequences. First, as noted, the lenition of a stem like
fan in (24) above results in a vowel-initial stem, which is then prefixed by d-. Besides, a
stem like freagair ‘to answer’ also undergoes both deletion of /f/ and d-prefixation,
even though the outcome of lenition is not vowel-initial: d’fhreagair ‘answered’. This
indicates that lenition and d-prefixation are distinct phenomena and can apply in
sequence. Of the two, lenition seems to be a primary exponent, while the contextdependent distribution of d- suggests a phonologically triggered augment (see Ó Sé
1991: 62). That d- is subordinate to lenition is plain in the dialect of West Kerry, where
the lenited dh- is prefixed to vowel-initial verbal stems after all leniting particles,
‘becoming in effect the lenition of vowels’ (Ó Sé 1991: 62; see also Ó Sé 2000: 324–
330). In addition, lenition appears alone cross-dialectally on suppletive simple past
34
allomorphs like tháinig ‘came’ or chonaic ‘saw’. There are significant open questions
about the phonology of this use of lenition (see Armstrong 1975), but for the purposes
of this analysis I will conclude that DO is a morpheme which expresses T marked
[Past], realized by a two-step process which involves lenition of stem-initial consonants,
and a prefixation which establishes a d- or dr- syllable onset.22
6.3 The exponence of [Past]: Preverbal particles
The last main factor determining the exponence of DO is the fact that some preverbal
particles block d-prefixation (not lenition). This is illustrated in the (b) examples in
(18)–(20) above, which also clarify that d-prefixation is blocked whenever the verb has
the feature [Past] in our analysis (that is, for simple past, past habitual, and conditional),
even though the particles in question carry a distinctive -r morpheme only in the simple
past. However, as anticipated in Section 3.2 above, a few particles do NOT block dprefixation, namely a (leniting relative particle, so-called ‘direct’), ó ‘since’23 and má
‘if’ (which contrasts with the counterfactual dá); to those, listed in Ó Siadhail (1989:
177), a JL referee adds arae and mar ‘because’. The situation can then be summarized
as follows, where the usual abbreviation C for ‘complementizer’ appears as Comp to
avoid any ambiguity:24
(27) For [Past] verbs not preceded by a preverbal particle:
d- – [Lenition] – STEM,
where [Lenition] applies to consonant-initial stems, and d- is prefixed to stems
that begin by vowel (inherently or as a result of lenition).
(28) For [Past] verbs preceded by a preverbal particle X:
(a)
if X is a (direct relative particle), má ‘if’, or ó ‘because’: same as (27)
(b)
if X is any other particle:
X – [Lenition] – STEM, where X is a leniting particle
35
X – [Nasalization] – STEM, where X is nasalizing particle
(29) (a)
Comp → Comp [Lenition]
for Comp = ní (negation, non-past), má
‘if’, a (direct relative)
(b)
Comp → Comp [Nasalization]
for Comp = go (complementizer, nonpast), nach (complementizer negation,
non-past), dá ‘if’, a (indirect relative), a
(interrogative, non-past), ...
The examples in (30)) and (31) illustrate (27) and (28), respectively (see also (18)–(20)
above). To exemplify (28b), (31b) shows the negative particle níor (leniting) followed
by a simple past, and (31b) shows the question particle an (nasalizing) followed by a
conditional. For clarity, the morpheme glosses include [L] and [N] for lenition and
nasalization on verbs:
(30)
D’fhan
sí
liom
DO.[L]wait
3SG.FEM
with.1SG
‘She waited for me.’
(31) (a)
a d’fhan
An bhean
DEF woman PRT
liom
DO.[L]wait
(direct relative, leniting a)
with.1SG
‘the woman that waited for me’
(b)
Níor
NEG.PST
fhan
sí
[L]wait
liom
(negative níor, simple past)
3SG.FEM with.1SG
‘She did not wait for me.’
(b) An bhfanfadh
sí
liom?
(interrogative an, conditional)
Q [N]wait.COND 3SG.FEM with.1SG
‘Would she wait for me?’
It is as if the particles listed in (28a) were simply not there. After the analyses of
Duffield (1995), McCloskey (2001), and Oda (2011), the property which singles them
36
out is not difficult to pinpoint: they are the only particles that have no negative and no
past alternant. Consider the ‘direct’ relative particle a. Its form and the mutation it
triggers are the same for all tenses of the verb, including the past, as in (31a). Other
particles, by contrast, morphologically express Tense oppositions. The ‘indirect’
relativizing particle, which differs from the ‘direct’ one in that the relativization site is
filled by a resumptive pronoun, opposes a non-past form a followed by nasalization, to
a past ar (for simple past) followed by lenition. It also has negative versions for each of
its tense alternants: nach, nasalizing, and nár, leniting. To negate a direct relative
construction, one must use the indirect forms, nach and nár; in other words, there is no
negative version specific to the direct relative particle. The same applies to má: its
negative past and non-past versions are those of the counterfactual dá, namely mura
(non-past, nasalizing) and murar (past, leniting).
Duffield (1995) derived this pattern from a structural asymmetry between
lenition-inducing T (the highest head below C in his assumptions) and nasalizationinducing C, on the assumption that negation always involves C. Given the lack of direct
morphosyntactic evidence for distinct positions for, say, direct and indirect relative a
(see especially the sustained critique in McCloskey 2001), I will instead relate the
difference to the presence of [Tense] marking on C. As we saw in Section 4.2, this is
related to the expression of negation: both types of marking appear on C as
uninterpretable features, as a morphosyntactic fact about the particles occupying C. 25
However, and this is the key hypothesis, not all particles are marked for [Tense]. More
precisely, suppose that particles with a past/non-past alternation are all and only those
marked for [Tense]. It is no accident that these are also the particles with negative
alternants: when it is not the non-finite gan, identical to the preposition ‘without’, Irish
37
negation is always attached to a Tense-inflecting morpheme.26 In this way, the basis for
attributing a [Tense] feature to C is paradigmatic, not syntagmatic: a particle may well
carry a [Tense] feature although it has no such morpheme, provided that it has a Tensebased opposition. For instance, the declarative subordinator go has no discrete Tense
morpheme, but it is formally marked [Tense] because it contrasts with the past gur. A
zero non-past exponent, by itself, is unremarkable for a default value.
In sum, d-prefixation for [Past] is blocked if and only if there are independent
reasons to attribute [Tense] marking to a preverbal particle. In addition, with the simple
past, particles are suffixed by -r. As we will see in Section 8, this is only one of the
respects in which the simple past stands out among other tenses, a circumstance which
will justify a distinct [Completive] feature for it. To a first approximation, to be refined
in Section 6.4, the exponence of T marked [Past] can be formally interpreted as follows:
(32) (a)
T [v, Tense: Past, Completive] ↔
/-r/ + [Lenition]
(b)
T [v, Tense: Past]
↔ Ø
(c)
T [v, Tense: Past]
↔ DO
+ [Lenition]
/ C [Tense] _____
/ C [Tense] _____
In the context of a Tense-marked C particle, the rule spelling out T [Past, Completive]
bleeds the less specific one spelling out T [Past]; DO realizes T [Past] elsewhere. Direct
a, arae, má, and ó are C-particles which lack [Tense], and so fall into the latter case. As
is natural for an elsewhere case, (32c) defines a heterogeneous context of application,
when the verb is preceded by particles (non-tensed), and when it is not.
6.4 The exponence of [Past]: C-sensitive verbal forms
It cannot be an accident that the same morphosyntactic context blocking d-prefixation
also triggers the appearance of the dependent root allomorphs presented in Section 3.2
above. We now see that both generalizations in (9) concern the marking of Tense on C,
38
because a, arae, má, and ó correspond to Tenseless instances of C. The natural
conclusion to draw is that dependent allomorphs are contextually licensed by C [Tense],
as in (32a–b). There is no [Dependent] feature, which would restate a syntactic property,
and whose distributional dependence on Tense allomorphy would be synchronically
accidental.27
Concretely, the proposal is articulated along the following points:
• C [Tense] consists of C fused with the linearly adjacent T. This makes precise the
intuition that all particles cliticize onto the verbal complex (see McCloskey 1996:
55), but those with a Tense opposition are more tightly associated with T.
• The simple past has the featural content [Past, Completive]. Root allomorphs
specific to this tense spell out the Fusion of a root and a v [Completive]. Of these
fused roots, some are marked as having to occur in the context of T [Past], others
are marked [Past] themselves.
• Dependent root allomorphs for the simple past are marked [Past] (beside
[Completive]) and must occur in the context of C [Tense].
• The characteristic -r of C expresses the feature complex [Completive, Past]; its
absence in front of dependent root allomorphs reflects a superficial rule banning
two adjacent morphological realizations of Tense, on C and on the verbal stem.
The hypothesis that Tense oppositions on C derive from the Fusion of C and T accounts
naturally for the interrelation between the exponence of C and of T. To recapitulate,
with the feature [Past], T is realized as DO (on regular verbs); in the presence of C, only
lenition appears (recall (32b) above). When the verbal complex has the featural content
39
that identifies the simple past tense, C is suffixed by -r, as in (32a) (with one systematic
set of exceptions, which will be addressed directly). Another major area of contact
between the morphology of verbs and the C system concerns Tense-specific
allomorphs. As detailed in Sections 3.1 and 3.2, some of these present one form for a
given tense (or an array of tenses), while others distinguish between a syntactically
independent and a dependent form. For example, the simple past of feic ‘to see’ is
chonaic, while that of déan ‘to do’ is rinne (independent) or dearna (dependent). Let us
review how the proposals listed above account for these data.
For tenses marked [Future], we have seen that forms like rach- in rachaidh ‘will
go’ realize the Fusion of a root with a v marked [Future]. Section 8 will deploy the same
logic to claim that [Completive] is another possible marking on v. However, the simple
past is not just [Completive], but [Past, Completive]; and [Past], by hypothesis,
originates on T, above v. Our approach hinges on this circumstance to explain why
precisely in the simple past the spellout of the verbal complex involves the interplay of
C, Tense-specific and dependent verbal forms. Allomorphs like chonaic realize a root
(notated √SEE) fused with a [Completive] v, but only in the context of a T marked
[Past]:28
(33) √SEE + v [Completive] ↔ chonaic
/ T [Tense: Past] _____
Note that (33) does not prevent a separate realization of T as DO; but this is the correct
result, because a simple past root allomorph may or may not co-occur with the regular
affix of T, as is often the case with forms ‘lexically’ marked on the root (compare the
English plurals men, with no plural suffix, and childr-en, which has the ending of oxen). Most such forms are consonant-initial and regularly display lenition, as chonaic
40
‘saw’ or chuala ‘heard’. In all dialects, however, fuair ‘got’ does not, and déir ‘to say’
has the unlenited simple past allomorph dúirt in most dialects, but this is analysed as
DO + úirt in Connacht and Ulster (d’úirt sé ‘he said’, níor úirt ‘didn’t say’; see Hughes
1994: 650; Ó hUiginn 1994: 590).
Verbs which distinguish dependent and independent forms require a slightly
different analysis. Suppose that the independent form rinne ‘did’ is inherently marked
[Past]. Because, by hypothesis, v does not bear this feature, the allomorph will spell out
the content of the fused root+v nodes, plus an inherent feature specification for T:
(34) √DO + v [Completive], [Tense: Past] ↔ rinne
Its dependent allomorph dearna is a positional alternant in the context of C+T:29
(35) √DO + v [Completive], [Tense: Past] ↔ dearna / C [Tense: Past] _____
Apart from allowing a straightforward statement of the dependent/independent contrast
as a case of contextual allomorphy entirely parallel to (32), this formulation sheds light
on a final puzzling aspect of the morphology of the simple past: the NON-PAST form of C
particles in front of dependent simple past verbs. This means that, in the standard as
well as across dialects, we systematically have ní raibh or an bhfaca? (‘was not’, ‘did
hear?’) and not *níor raibh or *ar fhaca, which we would expect on the basis of (32a).
It would appear, then, that the pattern to explain is the complementary distribution
between dependent simple past allomorphs and -r on C. The dialectal data suggest a
different interpretation, however. It is true that, in the simple past, the particles
preceding dependent allomorphs lack -r, but this also happens with on-dependent
allomorphs. Oscillations in the use of -r are amply recorded, especially in the West
41
Kerry dialect (recall footnote 21 above and see Ó Sé 2000: 327, 332), but it is
particularly noteworthy that even in the Connacht variety described by De Bhaldraithe
(1977 [1953]: 235), irregular verbs without a dependent form should allow both
constructions, with and without -r (for example, An gcuala? and Ar chuala? ‘Did [you]
hear?’). Such oscillations strongly suggest that the lack of -r is a ‘surfacy’ effect,
systematically triggered by dependent simple past allomorphs, but also possible in other
cases. Since the lack of -r always results in a morphologically non-past form, and
cannot therefore be just a phonological phenomenon, I hypothesize that a tensed C loses
its Tense features just before its realization, when it is linearly adjacent to a verbal form
inherently marked [Tense]. Dependent allomorphs, as in (35) above, always conform to
this description; but also forms for which Tense is a conditioning context, as in (33),
may trigger this phenomenon, which effectively amounts to the avoidance of two
adjacent [Tense] exponents. A distinction between allomorphs conditional on a local
[Past] feature, as in (33), and expressing the same feature by themselves, as in (34)–(35)
above, is a subtle one, but that is precisely what the data suggest.
In sum, then, -r does not strictly speaking realize T, as in (32a), but is an augment
on a C particle marked [Past, Completive]. A particle simply marked [Past] triggers just
lenition instead, which explains the lack of -r with the conditional and past habitual.
(36) (a) C + T [Tense: Past, Completive]
(b) C + T [v, Tense: Past]
↔ C-r + [Len]
↔ [Len]
In addition, a tensed C node undergoes Impoverishment of T features in front of a
linearly adjacent verbal form already marked [Completive].
42
(37) C [Tense] → C / ______ [Completive]
Note that not all -r on C have this function: the declarative complementizer go takes the
form gur when it incorporates the PRESENT copula:
(38) Deir-tear
gur
maith an ceoltóir é
say-IMPERS that.COP good
DEF
musician 3SG.M
‘They say he’s a good musician.’
Besides, the negative alternant of go is nár when the complementizer has an optative
function, followed by the subjunctive: Nár fhille sí ‘may she not return’ (GGBC: 214,
20.11). Despite their common origin (in the prospective function of the particle ro-, see
McCone 1987: 114–118), these two uses are best treated synchronically as different
morphemes from the augment in (36a) above, not only because of their content, but also
because -r in these functions is much less stable dialectally than in the simple past.30
In conclusion, T [v, Tense: Past] is spelled out by the complex of lenition and dprefixation notated DO, in root contexts and when preceded by Tenseless particles.
Instead, when preceded by Tensed particles T is no longer a distinct position of
exponence, but triggers the adjustments in (36)–(37) above, along with the mutations
triggered by specific choices of particles. This concludes our analysis of [Past] and
[Future] as the key ingredients of Irish verb morphology. Before turning to the third
feature to be proposed, it is necessary to consider how the categories introduced so far
relate to the semantic value of tenses.
7.
GRAMMATICAL FEATURES AND THE MEANING OF TENSES
7.1 Basic values of [Past] and [Future]
43
[Past] and [Future] do not mean ‘past’ or ‘future’ in the sense these words have in
English. As outlined in Section 4 above, they have a more abstract function, which in
the context of an interpreted clausal structure results in the semantic value of tenses.
Now that we have spelled out in some detail how these two features relate to syntax and
morphology, we can turn to how they determine the emergence of Irish tense semantics.
I follow Iatridou (2000) in viewing the meaning of past-tense morphology as a
relation of non-overlap between two arguments. [Past], then, means primarily
‘Exclusion’, both in the temporal value of ‘before-now’ and in the modal counterfactual
value, according to the schema in (39) (Iatridou 2000: 246):
(39) T(x) excludes C(x)
x = time or world
T = ‘the x that we are talking about’ (Topic x)
C = ‘the x that for all we know is the x of the speaker’ (Utterance x)
When the variable ranges over times, the schema results in a notional past
interpretation: exclusion between two temporal intervals evaluated at the same possible
world. Since only what is happening and what has happened can be factually true, a
relation of exclusion between the Utterance Time and the Assertion Time (the relevant
part of the Event Time, corresponding to Iatridou’s Topic Time) can only mean that the
event described by the predicate took place before the Utterance Time; what will occur
after ‘now’ may be more or less certain, but it is not treated by natural language
semantics as true as a matter of fact. When the variable ranges over possible worlds, a
counterfactual interpretation arises: the set of worlds in which the asserted part of the
event occurs does not include the speaker’s actual world. What triggers the modal
interpretation is, for Iatridou, future morphology; here, more precisely, [Future]. As a
44
first characterization of the semantics of Irish tenses, the combinations of [Past] and
[Future] then give rise to the following oppositions:
(40) (a)
[Past]
notional past
(simple past, past habitual)
(b)
[Past], [Future] counterfactual
(conditional)
(c)
[Future]
modal non-past
(future)
(d)
neither
non-past, non-modal
(present)
7.2 [Future], modality, and a deictic index
Suppose, then, that the presence of [Future] on the verbal chain licenses a reading of the
head Fin as a modal operator, relativizing the interpretation of the predicate to possible
worlds. Note that I am not proposing a morphosyntactic feature [Modal] distinct from
[Future], for which there would be no evidence, but a reading for the whole clausal
predication licensed by [Future] and interpreted at the top of the verb chain. The
counterfactual reading of the conditional follows from the interaction of modality and
exclusion, as noted. The future tense is instead a modalized present, which unlike the
conditional does not convey exclusion between the actual world and the world at which
the event occurs. There is no need to argue for the intrinsic modality of statements
framed in the future, asserted to occur at a not-yet-realized world resulting from the
current one at a temporally later stage (see Stowell 2007: 454 and literature cited there).
A head above Tense also seems the most plausible location for this type of information,
corresponding to what has been proposed for the Greek tha (see Philippaki-Warburton
1998; Iatridou 2000: 233). There is also independent evidence for the potentially modal
value of the future in Irish, after Ó Corráin (1992) documented the modern survival, and
possibly the extension, of modal functions already prominent in Old Irish (where the
45
future developed out of the subjunctive, see McQuillan 2002). The attestations cover
various types of obligation, as in (41), ability, as in (42), and habituality, as in (43):31
(41)
Ólfaidh
tú
drink.FUT 2SG
ceann
eile!
one
(Ó Corráin 1992: 7, 10)
other
‘Drink another one!’
(42)
Tífid
tú
lorg
see.FUT 2SG trace
na
gcos
(Ó Corráin 1992: 10)
DEF.GEN.PL foot.PL
‘You can see the footprints.’
(43)
Oibeóra
mé an lá ... agus nuair a
work.FUT 1SG DEF day and
codlóidh
mé
sleep.FUT 1SG
go
sámh
PRT
sound
thiocfas
when PRT come.FUT
an
oidhche
DEF
night
(Ó Corráin 1992: 13)
‘I work during the day ... and when the night comes I sleep soundly.’
While not common, these uses clearly show the synchronic connection between future
tense and modality. It may also be noted that the future of the lexical verb caith ‘to cast,
spend’, is grammaticalized as a deontic or epistemic light verb (Caitfidh sé a bheith fuar
‘it must be cold’, Caitfidh mé imeacht ‘I must leave’), showing that this tense allows for
a purely modal reading once it is decoupled from a lexical verb. Hypothesizing that
future morphology licenses an interpretation with access to alternative worlds naturally
subsumes these readings.
Still, the future tense is not the subjunctive: it is modal and non-past, but the
discussion so far does not specifically explain the ‘after-now’ interpretation. For that,
we need a distinct ingredient. This is a deictic time/world index, which characterizes the
Utterance Time as the speaker’s ‘here-and-now’. I will view this index as an argument
46
encapsulated on Fin, the deictic centre of the clause. Not all clauses, however, express
such a deictic centre, and the opposition between those that do and those that do not, in
tandem with the values of ‘exclusion’ for [Past] and ‘access to possible worlds’ for
[Future], provide the ingredients for the contrast between realis and irrealis in Irish.
To see this, consider more closely the idea of Tense as a relation between two
arguments. The internal argument corresponds to a relevant part of the event expressed
by the verbal predicate, either the interval corresponding to the Assertion Time, or the
worlds at which the event is true. Among the syntactic implementations of this
approach, that of Stowell (2007: 443–444) stands out for addressing the relation
between time-denoting expressions and the event argument associated with lexical
verbs. Stowell argues that the internal argument of the Tense relation is a time-denoting
phrase which incorporates an event position, identified by the verb as one of its
arguments and structurally realized in a specifier. The interpretation of the time t is
related to that of the event e according to the scheme ‘the time t such that the event e
happened at t’ (ignoring for simplicity the distinction between Assertion Time and
Event Time, as Stowell notes). In other words, the internal argument for Tense is not (a
projection denoting) the event itself, but (a projection denoting) the time interval in
which the event occurs. What is of interest in this approach is how the EXTERNAL
argument is syntactically expressed. The external argument ‘denotes a time that
functions as the REFERENCE POINT of the tense (its REFERENCE TIME, RT); in a simple
mono-clausal sentence, this generally corresponds to the actual Utterance Time (UT)’
(Stowell 2007: 438).32 Stowell places this covert argument in the specifier of TP, not in
a higher projection as I have suggested. But we can reconcile Stowell’s position with
the idea of Utterance Time being in Fin by suggesting that Fin hosts a time/world index
47
which binds a variable in the specifier of TP. It is this variable, notated x in the diagram
in (44), which acts as the external argument of Tense.
(44)
FinP
Fin
TP
T’
w0/t0
x0
T
vP
The claim, now, is that not all clauses express such a ‘here-and-now’ index under Fin.
When the index is present, the value of Tense is relative to a well-defined instant and
world localized as those of the utterance. When it is absent, the value of Tense is not
computed relative to such a deictic present, but to an external temporal argument which
is not characterized as ‘now’. It may express a timeless (individual-level) predication, or
an eventuality (event or state) more generically localized in a current or non-current
frame of reference, where this coarser temporal localization is not computed relative to
the actual Utterance Time. Such is the ‘present’ sense of generic statements like Bears
hibernate, which differs from the ‘past’ Dinosaurs ate kelp but does not depend for its
truth on what happens at the Utterance Time (it is true if uttered in mid-August when no
bear hibernates, as Iatridou (2000: 262) reminds us). A deictic time/world index which
may be missing, then, represents in syntactic terms the semantic insight that clauses can
be framed in a present or past time reference without this being based on the truth of the
predicate at the Utterance Time.
7.3 The emergence of realis
The contrast between clauses with and without a deictic index is not equivalent to the
opposition between modal and non-modal interpretation, but cross-classifies with it.
The realis reading of the future, as the expression of an event asserted to take place in a
48
world that is the temporal continuation of the actual world under minimal changes,
corresponds to a characterization of Fin as modal (interpretation having access to
alternative worlds) but encapsulating the w0/t0 index. This is the usual value of future
tense predications; we can now characterize the more strongly modal readings noted
above in (41)–(43) as lacking the deictic index on Fin. This amounts to claiming that the
interpretive contrast between a ‘proper’ future and a more strongly modalized one is
grammatically represented, but does not map directly to a morphological opposition.
The difference does not lie in the value of the [Future] feature itself, but in the presence
or absence of a w0/t0 argument under Fin.
Because the expression of a deictic index is dissociated from the modal value of
the clause, and the modal value in turn has a morphological reflex (in the feature
[Future]), we are introducing a grammatical opposition with no direct visible correlate:
a heavy assumption, but much less arbitrary than what would appear at first sight. First,
it is not completely true that the hypothesized opposition on Fin lacks all morphological
expression. It seems plausible that subjunctive forms, which occur in subordinate or in
root optative contexts, and always signal a modal or downright counterfactual
interpretation, are only compatible with a clausal context that does NOT anchor its
predication in the actual world and time. The subjunctive, then, directly correlates with
one of the values hypothesized on Fin, namely the LACK of a deictic time/world index.
Secondly, it is a fact of Irish verb morphology that one and the same form may have
two quite distinct functions, one deictically interpreted relative to the actual Utterance
Time and another more loosely characterized in temporal terms, if at all. Modal
readings are attested not only for the future, but also for the simple past, which is
overwhelmingly realis and generally incompatible with counterfactual uses like if the
49
earth was round or I wish it was true. Quin’s (1974: 47) historical overview of this use
ascribes the following examples to ‘the modern spoken language’:33
(45) (a) Dá dtuiteadh
if
NAS.fall.HAB
sé
bhí
sé
marbh
3SG.M
be.PST 3SG.M dead
‘If he had fallen he would be dead.’
(b) Bliain is
year
a’ lá
and a day
aniuv
do bách
today
PRT
die.PST
mo mháthair, is
my mother
and if
ngeódh
suí tímpal, is
fudó bhí
NAS.go.COND
aroundis
long be.PST 3SG.FEM in.DEF
COP
sí
dá
sa
bhaile
home
‘It is a year and a day today that my mother died, and if she had gone around
[i.e. taking a longer way on land] she would be at home for a long time.’
This is not a common value of the Irish simple past, but it is possible. A realis, nonmodal reading, then, is not an intrinsic component of what the verb form means, but a
clause-level characterization which typically accompanies the simple past. What
speakers learn as part of the meaning of this tense is that it generally correlates with a
realis value encoded elsewhere.
There is a final reason for positing a deictic index as a privative feature on Fin.
Recall that the paradigm of the copula only distinguishes a present and a non-present
form, and that the non-present ba can have a past or a counterfactual reading. This
means that the semantic opposition [±Realis] does not coincide with the morphological
opposition [±Past], since the past ba can have either [±Realis] value. It seems better to
view the counterfactual reading of ba as arising from [Past] appearing without a deictic
value on Fin, while the past reading obtains when [Past] is coupled to a deictic Fin.
Recall that copular constructions, lacking a lexical v, cannot be marked by [Future],
which characterizes v. They cannot, then, express a counterfactual reading made up of
50
‘exclusion’ (from [Past]) and ‘access to alternative worlds’ (from [Future]). Instead, the
presence or absence of a deictic index under Fin determines whether the predication is
assessed only with respect to the utterance world or not. Since the copula expresses an
individual-level predication, holding of an individual regardless of time, a past-in-thisworld copular predication must refer to an individual that was part of a past universe of
discourse (as in (17) above). Without an anchoring ‘now’, an individual-level
predication marked as ‘exclusion’ cannot refer to the past, but it still applies to
individuals seen as temporally indivisible; they are then asserted not to be part of the
actual world.34
In sum, [Past] has always an abstract value of ‘Exclusion’, and the anchoring of
the clausal predication in the actual world and in Utterance Time depends on the
presence of a deictic index. Because this index sits in Fin, it is compatible both with the
copula and with lexical verbs. Because it has no direct morphological expression, no
verb form (except for the subjunctive) directly correlates with its presence or absence.
With lexical verbs, a Fin encapsulating this deictic index enters in the expression of
statements about the existence of an event going on here-and-now (present), still to
happen in a world that is the continuation of here-and-now (future), or located at a time
defined as past by its exclusion with the Utterance Time. Of all these tenses, only the
simple past and the future regularly co-occur with a deictic index, with the readings ‘it
will be the case that p’ and ‘it was the case that p’; but even for them alternative modal
readings are possible. As for the copula, present and past forms with a deictic index
express predications about the present and the past universe of discourse; without a
deictic index they express a generic, atemporal statement, or one that is not asserted to
be true in the actual world. Globally, a semantic opposition emerges between realis and
51
irrealis, even though it does not correspond to the value of one grammatical feature, but
describes the reading which emerges from a complex construction.
8.
HABITUAL AND [COMPLETIVE]
8.1 Habitual does not reduce to frequentative or imperfective
In the habitual past, and for the lexeme bí also in the present, habituality is a
morphological category defined by a series of endings (and, for impersonal forms, preendings) and by a particular semantic value. However, the same endings also
characterize the conditional, without any semantic correlate. Wigger (1972: 176–177),
Ó Siadhail & Wigger (1983: 57) and Ó Siadhail (1989: 177–178) therefore hypothesize
that ‘habitual’ is a formal feature which has a semantic value (aspectual) only in the
present and in the past, while it takes part in forming the conditional as a purely
grammatical feature. I propose an alternative analysis, where what is positively marked
are the non-habitual forms. This, as we will see, accords with the morphological and the
semantic evidence that the simple past is ‘completive’.
The examples in (46), from Ó Sé (2001: 142), illustrate for the verb siúil ‘walk’
the core semantic contrast between the simple past shiúlaíos and the past habitual
shiúlaínn (forms of the Kerry dialect):
52
(46) (a) Nuair a
bhí
conaí
orm
when PRT be.PST home
i Maigh Nuad shiúlaíos
on.1SG in Maigh Nuad walk.PST.1SG to place
mo
chuid
oibre
POSS.1SG
share
work.GEN time one/some
b’ fhada liom
COP.long
go dtí
uair amháin/cúpla uair ach
times but
é
with.1SG it
‘When I lived in Maynooth I walked to work once/a few times but it was too long.’
(b) Nuair a
when
bhí
PRT
mo go
conaí orm
i Maigh Nuad shiúlaínn
be.PST home on.1SG in Maigh Nuad walk.PST.HAB
dtí chuid oibre.
to place my share work.GEN
‘When I lived in Maynooth I used to walk/walked to work’
(past habitual)
In this frequentative reading (Van Geenhoven 2004), the verb denotes an unspecified
plurality of temporally non-adjacent events, where the complex event stands to the
simplex walking event in the relation of a bare plural to a singular noun. The present
can have the same value, which does not have a special set of endings except for the
existential verb: so, Siulaíonn mé ‘I walk’, in principle, is compatible both with a
frequentative and a non-frequentative reading, even though a periphrasis is greatly
preferred for a progressive interpretation (‘I am walking right now’). As Ó Sé (2001:
124) notes, statements of cyclic repetition induce a generic interpretation which borders
on the atemporal, as in (47):
(47)
San
oirthear a
éiríonn
an
ghrian.
in.DEF
east
rise.PRES
DEF
sun
PRT
‘The sun rises in the east.’
(Ó Sé 2001: 124)
53
The sentence is true in the present, not because the sun is rising now, but because it
keeps rising as a property that is permanent in the world as it is now. Substituting ‘state’
for ‘permanent property’ results in the view that such predicates name not an event but a
state, which holds at the time of utterance (this is the line taken by Mezhevich 2008).
The problem is that a state is not the same as a permanent property. Simplifying the
nuanced discussion by Bertinetto (1994), confusing a truly aspectual notion like
habituality with an Aktionsart like stativity ignores important empirical differences.
Even when construed as habituals, predicates like wash the dishes or bring a present to
someone describe events, and the habit induced by a regular repetition of these events
differs from a genuine state (not constructed out of events) in a number of respects.35 If
anything, statives resemble a particular subclass of habitual predicates, which Bertinetto
(1994: 410) calls ATTITUDINALS, ‘characterized by the fact that the (more or less)
regular occurrence of a certain event is turned into a permanent property of a given
individual’. It is not the repetition per se, but its regular cyclic nature that makes rising
in the east in (47) an intrinsic property. The attested example in (48) (reproduced in the
phonetic transcription in which it appears in LASID), with a habitual present bíonn,
conclusively shows that repetition is not necessary for habitual interpretation, since
‘being out at night’ is not something that a path stops doing:
(48)
taxtərə
bˊjog ,o:
‘hax
gə tˊax,
ogəs bi:n ʃe
messenger little from house to house and is
mwi ,sən
3SG.M out
DEF.in
i:hə
night
‘A little messenger from house to house and it is out at night.’ (the path)
(LASID vol. 3, point 28, p. 36, text)
54
Likewise, a proverb like Bíonn an fhirinne searbh ‘Truth is bitter’ does not so much
express a regularly repeated state of affairs comparable to ‘I used to walk’, as much as a
generalization.
If the habitual does not turn an event into a state, it does not mark imperfectivity
either: note that, in (46), the simple past bhí of the temporal clause is unambiguously
imperfective. Apart from the existential verb, other stative verbs (among the few such
expressions that Irish has) show that the simple past can have an imperfective value, as
in the following examples:
(49) (a)
Nuair a bhí mé i mo pháiste, thaitin siocláid liom go mór.
‘When I was a child, I liked chocolate a lot.’
(b)
Is cuimhin liom a chluinstin fá seanfhear a chónaigh leis féin agus a fuair
bás go tobann.
(republicannews.org/archive/2000/June29/29gaei.html)
‘I remember I heard about an old man who lived alone and died suddenly.’
(c)
... áiteanna cosúil le Cúl Aodha, áit ar chónaigh sé ag am a dhealraigh an
náisiún a oidhreacht shaibhir a aimsiú
(www.whatsonni.com/more_info.php?id=7770)
‘Places like Cúl Aodha, where he lived at a time when the nation seemed
to discover its rich heritage.’
‘Habitual’ verbal forms, then, cannot be equated with imperfective ones.
8.2 Habituality as nomic imperfectivity
The semantic value of habituality corresponds to what Lenci & Bertinetto (2000, 2010)
call ‘nomic’ modality: the verbal predicate is asserted to be true in all worlds qualified
as normal according to some pragmatic parameter. The exceptions notoriously admitted
by constructions like I used to go to bed early, and which distinguish the habitual-
55
frequentative reading from a universal quantification like I always went to bed early,
are tolerated as far as they are not part of the set of law-like occurrences which form the
modal base. This distinguishes I used to go to bed early, but on that night I didn’t,
where the exceptional event explicitly contrasts with the normal conditions, from the
deviant #I used to go to bed early except on March 15, 1951, where the PP expressing
the exception lies in the scope of the habitual predicate. In addition, events which are
stated to be indefinitely many do not admit explicit quantification, even vague (many
times), and so differ from iteratives, which simply assert the repetition of an event, as in
I walked to work 100 times/every day:
(50)
... Shiúlainn go dtí mo chuid oibre
#céad uaire/#ach amháin ar an lá sin.
‘I used to walk to work #a hundred times/#except on that day.’
As we saw with (49), statives show that the habitual is not necessary in order to describe
an eventuality as holding for an indefinite interval. But even statives take on the
habitual form if the predicate generalizes over the participants in the event:
(51)
Fadó, fadó agus is fada fíorach an lá ó shin é bhíodh a fhios ag gach uile
dhuine cén uair a gheobhadh sé bás.
(comhaltas.ie/education/comhra/scealta)
‘A long, long time ago, everybody knew when they would die.’
(lit.: ‘there was knowledge at everybody’)
A sentence like (52) refers both to generically many events and to generally many
participants, and correspondingly uses the past habitual in the highlighted forms:
56
(52)
Cheapaidís na fir gur saint chun an airgid do bhí air, trá’s go mbíodh sé ag
obair chómh dian. Agus ansan do bhíodh iongnadh ortha a rádh go sgaradh sé
chómh bog leis.
(P. Ua Laoghaire, Séadhna, BÁC, 1904, p. 50)
‘The men thought that it was greed for money that moved him, seeing that he
used to work so hard. But then they would wonder that he used to part with it
so easily.’
(Shiana, transl. 1915, p. 45)36
As Lenci & Bertinetto (2010: 40–41) clarify, generic habituals arise at the conjunction
of two properties, iterativity and nomic modality. As iterative predications are possible
without having the law-like force of habituals, law-like generalizations can occur
without iteration, in generic statements like Two plus two equals four, or in individuallevel predications like John is intelligent, or in attitudinal predications like This machine
crushes oranges. In Irish, atemporal generalizations (especially existential statements)
routinely employ the non-habitual present, contrasting with generic predications like
(48) (‘[the path] is out at night’) which name an eventuality holding true in space and
time and use the habitual instead:37
(53)
Tá trí shaghas comhaimsirí ann, aimsirí leanúnacha, aimsirí foirfe agus
aimsirí timchainteacha.
(GGBC: 139, 14.10)
‘There are three types of compound tenses, progressive tenses, perfect
tenses, and periphrastic tenses.’
Like a mathematical statement, this classification is not asserted to hold at a time or
another; but the existential format Tá X ann ‘There is X’ defines a so-called thetic
judgement, that is, a statement about a situation (here atemporal), which is the topic of
57
the sentence. By contrast, a categorical judgment like Is dochtúir é ‘He is a doctor’ is a
statement about the subject of predication, which is the topic of the sentence.
In sum, the semantic value of habitual past (and present bíonn) is best
characterized in modal terms, as the habitual variety of nomic imperfectivity. However,
this type of modality differs from that triggered by the feature [Future]. In particular, the
exclusion expressed by [Past] on habitual past verbs does not range over non-actual
worlds as with counterfactuals, but is still interpreted as referring to times (so used to
walk denotes the set of normal worlds where walking occurs previous to now). This
strongly suggests that [Habitual] is not a feature on v, like [Future] is. Instead, the
semantic value of habitual sentences it is a generic operator higher than T, at clauselevel; Fin suggests itself as a likely location.
8.3 Habitual as ‘not [Completive]’
All we have said so far concerns habituality as a semantic value of the past habitual and
present tenses (whether or not it has morphological exponence in the latter). Recall,
however, that habituality has nothing to do with the semantics of the conditional, even
though the past habitual and the conditional share the same endings. By itself, this
circumstance suggests that habituality is not the content of a morphological feature,
since it appears in the absence of morphological marking (on the present of verbs other
than bí) and it does not appear in the presence of morphological marking (conditional).
As a further piece of evidence pointing in this direction, consider that the present, and
more specifically the habitual form bíonn for the existential verb, appears systematically
after the realis conditional conjunction má with future interpretation, while
morphologically future forms are generally excluded. Whatever the precise reason for
58
the avoidance of future, it shows once more the habitual form occurring without the
generic force of nomic-modal habituals.38
Bearing in mind that even the nomic-modal interpretation in fact gathers together
several different readings (frequentative in (46b), non-eventive in (48), generic in (51)–
(52)), it is hard not to agree with McQuillan’s (2002: 194) characterization of the
habitual as the default form for a temporally present reading. A view of habitual forms
as underspecified would in fact make it easier to understand the strong tendency for the
conditional to be used in the function of past habitual and conversely (see Hughes 1994:
645; Ó hUiginn 1994: 579; the two tenses coalesced in Scottish Gaelic and in Manx), a
drift which would not be obvious if its only cause were formal similarity enhanced by
phonetic erosion (Ó Sé 2001: 138). Similar considerations apply to the merger of past
habitual and past subjunctive (Ó hUiginn 1994: 578; LASID vol. 2, point 734). What I
suggest, then, is not just that the ‘habitual’ morphology shared by past habitual and
conditional is a purely formal marker with no direct semantic import, as already Wigger
(1972: 168, 176) proposed, but that there is no [Habitual] feature at all, not only
semantically but also in morphology.
Semantically, the habitual interpretation does not arise from a positive marking,
whether morphologically realized or not, but from the LACK of a contrary
characterization. In fact, formally habitual verbs may receive various interpretations, not
only those as habitual or generic proper but also as ‘default’ present, or in the function
of a conditional; but there is one reading that a habitual form never has, namely one
denoting a single, atomic, specific event. In a word, habituals are never episodic.39
‘Episodic’ is instead a fitting characterization for the simple past and the present tá,
which denote single complete events (possibly repeated, of course, if in the scope of
59
adverbials like a few times). This comes close to an aspectual characterization as
‘bounded’; and indeed, the simple past morphemes DO and -r historically derive from a
marker ro-, whose telic value became grammaticalized as a resultative or potential
marker in Old Irish and subsequently lost its perfect value (see McCone 1987: 97–98,
119–136; McManus 1994: 408–409). But ‘bounded’ suggests a perfect value, and as we
have seen the non-habitual forms are not definitionally perfect (recall (49) above). The
traditional term PRETERITE for the simple past is more appropriate, although it does not
describe the difference with the past habitual. The characterization I propose is that the
Assertion Time (the relevant interval about which an assertion is made) entirely
coincides with the Event Time (the interval at which the verb event takes place). As
Binnick (1991: 210, 296–297) mentions, this is the value of the category that Johnson
(1977) called [Completive] in her analysis of Kikuyu.
The simple past, then, is [Past, Completive], where the second feature entails that
the Assertion Time coincides with Event Time. This rules out frequentative readings as
in I used to run: the verb predicate run denotes a single running event, while the
habitual macro-event identified by the Assertion Time is made up of generically many,
temporally disjoint running events. There is then no coincidence between the interval
about which an assertion is made (the duration of the habit), and the interval at which
the verb predicate is true.40 On the other hand, this condition can be met if the event is
conceptualized as lacking natural boundaries. All that is required is that, even when the
predicate does not denote an intrinsically bounded action, it is conceptualized in its
entirety. Mostly, the coincidence between Assertion and Event Time results in properly
episodic aoristic readings like that of shiúlaíos in (46a) above: ‘I walked (once)’, where
the interval on which the assertion is based coincides with the walking event, neither
60
being properly included in it, nor coming after its completion (as in the perfect I
have/had walked). But, as we have seen, the simple past bhí in the same sentence has
imperfective value. This only happens with verbs like ‘to be’, or in principle with other
stative verbs (except that Irish expresses notions like ‘to love’ or ‘to know’ via
periphrases). Likewise, tá ‘is’ is [Completive] in cases like Tá mé i mo chónaí anseo ‘I
live here’ not because the event of living is characterized as perfective, but because the
interval in which it holds corresponds to the interval about which an assertion is made.41
It suffices to take activity verbs like siúil ‘to walk’ or fan ‘to wait’, even though they are
durative and atelic, to see that the simple past enforces an episodic reading: ‘he walked’
or ‘he waited’ as a single event. What the two readings have in common is that the
predicate is conceptualized as a single, unitary occurrence, either as an action (‘it
occurred once that x’) or as a state (‘it was the case that x). In the past, both are
compatible with perfect construals like Ar léigh tú an leabhair seo ariamh? ‘Did you
ever read this book?’, as in the American (and Irish) use of the English preterite (see
GGBC: 161, 15.14). In the present, a classificatory statement like Tá trí shaghas
comhaimsirí ann ‘There are three types of compound tenses’ describes a state of affairs
as uniformly true for as long as the assertion is relevant – in this case, timelessly.
8.4 [Completive] in morphology: Why the simple past is different
Morphology provides substantive evidence for a feature singling out the simple past.
We have already seen that this tense stands out among others in some respects:
• It is the only tense where the impersonal form lacks the characteristic exponents
of past, do and/or lenition: D’ól mé ‘I drank’, but Óladh ‘One drank’ (Section 6.2
above).
61
• It is the only ‘past’ tense with a dedicated root allomorph (Section 3.1 above).
• It is the only tense in which the prefix do is replaced by -r when the verb occurs
after a subordinating particle: D’ól mé but negative Níor ól mé ‘■■■■’ (Sections
6.1 and 6.4 above).
In addition, two more observations about the simple past show that morphological rules
are specifically sensitive to this tense, rather than to the features [Past] or [Future]:
• It has a separate paradigm of personal endings: Ø, -mar (1pl), impersonal /-əx/,
/-əg/, or /-u/; dialectally (Ó Siadhail 1989: 181) /-s/ (1sg, 2sg), /-wər/ (2pl), /-dər/
(3pl).
• It is the only tense without a discrete morpheme before the impersonal ending.
Having a tense-specific set of endings, by itself, would not justify any significant
conclusion; after all, the same is true of the present. What suggests a special marking is
that the simple past necessarily shares the [Past] feature with the past habitual and the
conditional, because of its notionally past interpretation (recall Section 6). Yet, in all
dialects, these two tenses share the same endings and the simple past stands by itself, as
illustrated in (54) with the paradigms of the verb mol ‘to praise’, as they appear in the
official standard (CO 2001 [1958]: 47–48).
(54)
CONDITIONAL
PAST HABITUAL
SIMPLE PAST
1sg
mhol-f-ainn
mhol-ainn
mhol mé
2sg
mhol-f-á
mhol-t-á
mhol tú
3sg
mhol-f-adh sé
mhol-adh sé
mhol sé
62
1pl
mhol-f-aimis
mhol-aimis
mhol-amar
2pl
mhol-f-adh sibh
mhol-adh sibh
mhol sibh
3pl
mhol-f-aidís
mhol-aidís
mhol siad
impers.
mhol-f-aí
mhol-t-aí
mol-adh
The initial -a of endings like -ainn is purely orthographical; with bris ‘to break’, the
corresponding form would be bhris-inn, the ending being /-əN´/ in both cases. The
phonological endings are then /-əN´/, /-ɑː/, /-əx/, /-əmi∫/, /-əx/, /-ədiː∫/, /-iː/; the further
assumption that the schwa is due to a phonological process of syllabic readjustment (Ó
Siadhail 1989) simplifies them to /-N´/, /-ɑː/, /-x/, /-mi∫/, /-x/, /-diː∫/, /-iː/. Only two of
those are underlyingly vocalic, the second person singular /-ɑː/ and the impersonal /-iː/.
These are precisely the cells with a ‘pre-ending’ consonant (see Section 5.2), another
property shared by conditional and habitual against the simple past. In fact, the insertion
of a pre-ending before a vowel-initial ending is general:
(55) (a) Impersonal forms across tenses
mol-t-ar
present, subjunctive
mol-f-ar
future
mhol-f-aí
conditional
mhol-t-aí
past habitual
mol-adh
past
(b) Impersonal endings
/-ər/ present, subjunctive, future (non-[Past] tenses)
/-iː/ past habitual, conditional ([Past] tenses minus simple past)
/-əx/, /-əg/, /-u/ simple past
(c) Impersonal pre-endings
/-t-/ present, subjunctive, past habitual (non-[Future] tenses)
/-f-/ conditional, future ([Future] tenses minus simple past)
63
Ø
simple past
The hypothesis that /-ər/ is underlyingly vowel-initial subsumes all these pre-endings
under a single rubric: they are morphophonological adjustments, inserted in front of
endings that are vowel-initial before the effect of syllabic readjustment, and realized as f- (phonological /f/, not /h/) in tenses that involve [Future], otherwise as -t-. This is
expressed in (56), where ‘VX [Fin]’ stands for a vowel-initial affix that is an exponent
of Finiteness (see below):
(56) (a)
STEM–VX
[Fin] →
STEM–f–VX
[Fin] / [Future] ______
(b)
STEM–VX
[Fin] →
STEM–t–VX
[Fin]
This readjustment does not concern the present, whose only ending -(e)ann is
underlyingly /-N/ (Ó Siadhail 1989: 178). More importantly, it does not concern the
simple past either, where the only endings are underlyingly consonant-initial, including
the impersonal -adh, phonologically /-x,/ or /-u/; see Ó Siadhail (1989: 180–181) for
details about the dialectal past endings /-s/, /-wər/, and /-dər/, as well as the future ones,
all likewise consonant-initial. It seems natural, therefore, to hypothesize that the
realization rules for these endings apply to the simple past alone, something which we
can do by assuming a positive marking [Completive] that singles out the simple past
from the other [Past] tenses.
Since the simple past has special root allomorphs, I locate [Completive] on v,
local to the root like [Future] (Section 5.1), thus predicting the lack of a simple past on
the copula (predicting, that is, that the ‘past’ has only one form there, without an
opposition in habituality). This, then, explains why the simple past has dedicated root
allomorphs but the past habitual does not: the former involves a structure where a
64
[Completive] v can fuse with a root, while the latter involves [Past] on T, too distant
from the root to allow for Fusion:
(57) [ C
[ Fin
[ T
Past
[
v
[
root]]]]]
Future/Completive
The two values of v must be regarded as mutually complementary, as a JL referee
observes. As a lexical exception, the form tá of the existential verb spells out v
[Completive] fused with the root of the existential verb in the context of [Non-past] T:
(58) √BÍ, v [Completive] ↔ tá
/ T [Tense: Non-past] _____
As mentioned in Section 8.3, there are reasons to believe that, apart from this exception,
present tense morphology has a ‘habitual’ reading as a default, which would explain the
use of progressive periphrases even for stative verbs (Ó Sé 2001: 132). However, it can
also have a punctual deictic interpretation, as in Cloisim anois é ‘I hear it now’ (Ó Sé
2001: 130) (a JL referee also mentions the use of present with this value in running
commentaries of sport events). I conclude that [Completive] can appear on v both when
T is marked [Past] and when it is not, resulting respectively in the simple past and in a
non-habitual reading of the present.
8.5 [Completive] in morphology: Endings
Pronominal endings realize person–number combinations under Fin, which is also
marked for Tense. As the realization of endings is sensitive also to features on v, it
depends globally on the whole content of the inflected verb. A value [Past, Completive]
on Fin defines the simple past paradigm. As shown in (54) above, the standard variety
has only one personal ending for this tense, all other forms being analytic, plus the
65
impersonal, here marked [Arb]. The analytic ending applies if there are no more specific
rules:
(59) Endings of simple past: spellout of Fin marked [Past, Completive]
Fin: [Past, Completive], 1pl
↔ /-mar/
Fin: [Past, Completive], [Arb] ↔ /-x/
Fin: [Past, Completive]
↔ Ø
Fin marked [Past] but not [Completive] realizes the endings of conditional and past
habitual:
(60) Endings of conditional and past habitual: spellout of Fin marked [Past]
Fin: [Past], 1sg
↔ /-N´/
Fin: [Past], 2sg
↔ /-ɑː/
Fin: [Past], 1pl
↔ /-m´i∫/
Fin: [Past], 3pl
↔ /-d´iː∫/
Fin: [Past], [Arb] ↔ /-iː/
Fin: [Past]
↔ /-x/
Neither set of rules applies to the present, which lacks the feature [Past] and so does not
morphologize the semantically observable [±Completive] opposition.
9.
CONCLUSION
This study has been above all an attempt at a synthesis: of syntactic, morphological, and
semantic explanation, of syntagmatic and paradigmatic phenomena, and of different
strands of research. The guiding idea that syntax generates paradigm space allowed us
to derive several regularities from independently justifiable assumptions about the
66
structure of Irish clauses. In tandem with a constructional approach to Tense, this has
led to a featural analysis of each tense, along with further subdivisions for the different
readings related to a deictic index (t0/w0) under Fin. Table 3 summarizes its results.
Fin
FEATURE
TENSE
t0/w0
[Completive]
Present
Present (generic)
t0/w0
t0/w0
t0/w0
[Completive, Past]
Simple past
[Completive, Past]
Simple past (modal)
[Past]
Past habitual
[Past]
Past habitual (generic)
[Future]
Future
[Future]
Future (modal)
[Past, Future]
Conditional
Subjunctive
Table 3
Featural decomposition of Irish verbal tenses.
Several novel claims accompany this interpretation: that second-conjugation verbs are
(usually) morphologically complex because they must obey a templatic constraint
encoded on v; that habitual morphology and semantics represents an unmarked value,
contrasting with [Completive]; that the distribution of irregular root allomorphs across
tenses follows from their nature as fused [root–v] morphemes; that morphemes on C are
marked for [Tense] even in the absence of overt past markers -r (except for three
particles that consistently prove invisible), and that positional allomorphy conditioned
by C (both for root allomorphs and DO realization) is in fact triggered by C’s [Tense]
feature, without the need for a [Dependent] feature. I have tried to be as explicit as
67
possible about the theoretical premises for these conclusions, which are all empirically
falsifiable. I am confident that dialectologically-informed research on this fascinating
language will show just how falsifiable they are.
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paolo.acquaviva@ucd.ie
74
FOOTNOTES
1
I would like to thank Aidan Doyle, James McCloskey, Diarmuid Ó Sé, and two
anonymous Journal of Linguistics referees for insightful comments which substantially
improved this paper. Thanks also to the audience of the 6th Celtic Linguistics
Conference (University College Dublin, 12 September 2010). All errors and omissions
are my responsibility.
The following abbreviations are used in example glosses: 1, 2, 3 = first, second, third
person; CONDIT = conditional ; COP = copula ; DEF = definite; DO = prefix realized as /d/ or lenition; F = future/conditional suffix; FEM = feminine; FUT = future; GEN = generic;
HAB
= habitual; IMPERS = impersonal; [L], [N] = lenition, nasalization; M = ; NAS =
nasalization; NEG = negation; PST = past; PL = plural; PRES = present; PRT = particle; SG
= singular; VN = verbal noun.
2
Dialects vary also, to some degree, in the form of the endings themselves. This
concerns the regular person/number endings as well as those traditionally labelled
‘responsives’ or ‘echo forms’ (Ó Siadhail 1989: 183), as in Bhris tú an chathaoir, ar
bhrisis? ‘You broke the chair, didn’t you?’. As McCloskey (1991) has shown, these
endings correlate in fact more generally with a following ellipsis site. Related to these
are special ‘relative’ endings appearing on present and future verb forms appearing in
wh-constructions, like the Connacht Nuair a theaganns ‘When you [sg] come’, from an
inherited analytic form theagas crossed with the synthetic teagann (Ó hUiginn 1994:
582; see McCloskey 2001: 72).
3
I disregard the past subjunctive, which synchronically reduces to a use of the past
habitual or of the conditional, except for some minor formal differences in some
75
varieties (de Bhaldraithe 1977 [1953]: 73) and for the form be- rather than bí- in the
existential verb bí (GGBC 14.26, 14.52: 142, 150; Ó Siadhail 1989: 179; Ó hUiginn
1994: 578–579). For a detailed and theoretically sophisticated historical account of the
subjunctive in Irish, see McQuillan (2002).
4
I will use the capitalized form ‘Tense’ for the grammatical category in general (a
generic abstract noun, as in Tense is a syntactically represented two-place relation),
while lower-case ‘tense’ refers to categories like future or past habitual (a count noun,
as in Irish has two past tenses).
5
Verbs are cited by their root form, following traditional practice.
6
For an in-depth analysis of the morphology of verbal nouns, see Bloch-Trojnar (2006).
See also Reed (2011) for an analysis of the very similar (but distinct) aspectual system
of Scottish Gaelic.
7
Ó Sé (1990) mentions an isolated report of a distinct future form of the copula from a
Munster dialect, said to be ‘nearly obsolete’ in 1934. As this appears to be an isolated
survival, I will assume that it lies outside the synchronic system which the analysis aims
to account for. It is, however, a potentially serious empirical problem; I thank one JL
referee for pointing it out.
8
As noted, the standard does not coincide with any natural historical dialect, and simply
illustrates the facts to account for. What is crucial, then, are less the forms in Tables 1
and 2 than the generalizations in (7) and (9).
9
This example is for illustrative purposes only, but it is worth noting that the past stem
dúirt irregularly resists initial lenition. Similarly, the past allomorph fuair of faigh takes
a nasalized form (bhfuair) after particles which everywhere else trigger lenition. A JL
referee suggests that this kind of irregularity amounts to (non-suppletive) allomorphy in
76
dependent contexts, which is the approach of Oda (2011, 2012). I prefer to detach these
lexical irregularities from the status of dependent forms, however, for several reasons:
resistance to lenition is attested elsewhere, not just on verbs but on nouns too (like méid
‘quantity’); for the verb déir, it affects all tenses, not just the past; this very verb is also
irregular in lacking the -eann ending in the present (except in some dialects); and while
Oda’s (2011: 251) analysis of bhfuair as a dependent form of fuair is intriguing, its
logic leads to viewing in dúirt two homophonous forms, one dependent and one
independent.
10
Reed (2011) justifies for Scottish Gaelic a more precise distinction between ‘simple’
aspectual values, based on a containment relation, and ‘state-relational’ ones, which
introduce a state holding at the Assertion Time and specify its relation with the Event
Time (anterior/posterior, immediately adjacent, resulting from it). Her analysis is
certainly relevant for a proper understanding of the Irish system as well.
11
Duffield (1995: 92–95) analyses the -ann endings of the present tense as a spellout of
Asp, but the only reason is that this ending cannot correspond to T in his analysis.
12
Thus, the reading is equivalent to ‘if I stayed back and they lost’, taking to stay back
as the contradictory of to go. If the negation in (11) had scope over both conjuncts, we
should be able to translate the protasis as Unless I were to go and they were to lose; but
this is not what (11) means.
13
There is a general agreement that the copula is not a lexical verb, but not all syntactic
analyses locate it is T; in particular, Carnie (1995) interprets it as C.
14
A JL referee points out that a palatal extension also seems to appear in certain forms
of first-conjugations verbs like léigh ‘to read’, where it does not alternates with /oː/
(present léann, future léifidh). Either these are CVj roots and the palatal segment drops
77
before vocalic endings, or they are indeed combined with a palatal extension, but this
does not turn them into the second declension because the root is just CV. Ó Siadhail
(1989: 170), following Ó Siadhail & Wigger (1983: 53), simply treats léigh as a CVC,
first-conjugation verb, with long vowel and root-final C = /j/.
15
Note that this is not an instance of an output constraint on the shape of words
dictating the choice of a word-internal allomorph, as in the ‘allomorphic vacillation’
which for Embick (2010) is predicted by global output constraints. The prosodic
requirement is triggered by the choice of the root, not the other way around. The future
allomorph is a reflex of this lexical marking, not a constraint on the shape of Irish verbs.
16
Some dialectal data point in the same direction. Realizations like /kriN´ax əj/ for the
future cruinneoidh ‘will gather’ in the Donegal dialect have been analysed as a
sequence of two future suffixes by Ó Siadhail (1989: 175–176) and Ó Sé (1991: 74–75),
more precisely as /oːj/ + /əj/ and /a/ + /h/, respectively. These forms, however, do not
wear their morphological structure on their sleeve but call for an independently justified
analysis, and in any case cannot serve as sole basis for a whole account of the
morphology of future verbs in Irish.
17
Descriptively, one can say that /iː/ disappears in the presence of /oː/ (Ó Siadhail 1989:
174); but a structural analysis that restated this would not achieve its goal, which is to
go beyond a surface description.
18
Relating prosodic templates to different verbalizers pre-dates Arad’s (2005) DM
analysis, and may in fact be an oversimplification; see Faust (2011: Chapter 6), who
identifies a templatic morpheme between v and the root.
19
The ending -adh is the one which appears before a pronominal or DP subject, without
expressing a person/number value. I gloss it as HAB, since it appears on tenses that could
78
be characterized as ‘habitual’; but it is, at most, a secondary exponent of this category,
as I will argue in Section 8.
20
Dialectal data nuance this description, as usual, but do not blur the sharp difference
between simple past on one hand and past habitual and conditional on the other.
Preverbal particles may appear without -r before a simple past verb, especially in
Munster (see LASID vol. 2, 737, points 1, 7, 8 (both variants), 12, 17, 20 (both
variants), 22; see also points 936, 1021; and Ó Sé 2000: 324), but a particle with -r
never seems to appear before conditional and past habitual forms (for conditional, see
LASID vol. 2, points 507 and 728). As is well known, most inherently past root
allomorphs, like raibh, typically take non-past particles; see Section 6.4 below.
21
The facts are made more complex by dialectal variation and by the idiosyncratic
behaviour of irregular verbs. For instance, Ó Sé (1991: 67) discusses dialects where
lenition is suspended in the impersonal of the past habitual rather than in the simple
past. In addition, there are examples of DO with impersonal forms; see Ó Sé (2001:
232–234) (thanks to Aidan Doyle for pointing out the latter cases to me).
22
Ó Sé (1991: 62–63) views instead these stem-initial adjustments as a
‘morphophonemic process’, rather than a morpheme in itself.
23
As a preposition, ó is probably outside CP; but in any case it relates to a C position
when used as a subordinator; the assumption refers to this position.
24
I write ‘consonant’ and ‘vowel’ in (27), to avoid any confusion with the symbol ‘C’,
which stands for ‘complementizer’ elsewhere (except in statements about the
phonological structure of roots, where ‘CVC’ or ‘CVCəC’ refer to segmental melodies).
‘VX’ stands instead for ‘vowel-initial’ in (49), where there is no risk of confusion. Rule
(27) glosses over the prefixation of d- to fr-initial stems, which I take to be a matter of
79
phonological realization. A different formulation may be possible if, following Gorrie
(2011), lenition and nasalization were morphophonological features, distinct from
morphosyntactic features like [Past] or [Masculine] but referenced by morphology.
25
That C hosts Tense in Irish was argued by Cottell (1995). Since then, Oda (2011,
2012) has provided fresh arguments for this position in a detailed analysis of Irish
dependent verbs and free relatives. My account parallels his in attributing a key role to
Tense on C in licensing dependent forms and inhibiting DO. On the other hand, I take -r
on C to express [Past, Completive] and not just [Past] (Sections 6.4 and 8.6; contrast
Oda 2012: 182), and I reject a feature [Irregular] to mark off verbs with unpredictable
allomorphy (contrast Oda 2012: 184).
26
Acquaviva (1996) attempted to derive from this generalization the fact that Irish lacks
specifically negative determiners in the nominal domain, where the negative feature is
decoupled from Tense. This would also explain why Irish lacks not just negative, but
more generally monotone decreasing quantifiers (like ‘few Ns’), assuming they involve
the same syntactic feature. In a way, the single expression of clausal negation on T
accords with the strong head-marking character of Irish.
27
Oda (2011: 244–246; 2012: 158) analyses dependent forms as expressing not one, but
two [Tense] markings, distinct for the purposes of Vocabulary Insertion. In addition, he
posits a Fusion of C and T + v, followed by Fission (the operation which, opposite to
Fusion, splits one morphosyntactic position into two positions of exponence) of the Crelated features other than [Tense]; these then trigger further Vocabulary Insertion as
negative/question particles. It is not clear to me what feature would be spelled out as go
‘that’ in this account.
80
28
For exactly one verb in the language, the existential bí, the context of application
specifies T [Tense: Non-past], resulting in the episodic present tá; see Section 8.4.
29
There are also dependent allomorphs requiring the feature [Future], as faighid in
Table 2; in that case, v is [Future], and the context of application remains C+T. More
interestingly, Ulster dialects display dependent forms even in the past habitual (Hughes
1994: 652 cites Níodh sé ‘He used to do’ – An ndeánadh sé? ‘Did he use to do?’). What
must be noted here is that neither allomorph is specific to the past habitual (ní- is the
stem of the present, deán- of the future, conditional, and imperative). The root deán- is
then selected over ní- in the context of C+T, in a tense that, as I will argue in Section 8,
has only the feature [Past].
30
For instance, the copular version of go typically lacks -r in the Connacht dialect of
Cois Fairrge (De Bhaldraithe 1977[1953]: 88–106); omission of -r on ‘past’
complementizer is instead relatively circumscribed, mainly in areas that have totally
restructured the exponence of -r/DO, like West Kerry (Ó Sé 2000: 324)
31
A JL referee suggests that the modal interpretation in these cases is pragmatically
inferred on the basis of Gricean implicature (the assertion that a state of affairs will hold
in the future validates the inference that this scenario represents the ‘normal’
development, in accord with expectations or obligations). This is possible, if not equally
plausible for all modalities, especially for habitual readings as in (43). The question that
arises is then why this use of the future tense is not more common than it is, in Irish and
in other languages.
32
An important difference emerges here between the notion of ‘Reference Time’ as
viewpoint anchoring anteriority to the Event Time, as in the perfect, and as a temporal
frame determining inclusion, overlap, or exclusion. Reed’s (2011) analysis of Scottish
81
Gaelic views this distinction as one between ‘simple’ and ‘state-relational’ aspectual
characterizations. Her account largely applies to Irish, despite some differences. In
particular, Irish lacks a non-immediate perfect parallel to the Scottish Bha mi air
sgrìobhadh ‘I had written’.
33
For this use of the simple past, see also GGBC: 161, 15.13. Note the archaic past do
bách ‘died’, with do before a consonant-initial root.
34
My interpretation of the realis opposition in Irish differs from that of Ó Sé (1990) (to
which it is indebted), since it is not restricted to the copula. With reference to the twoway opposition of copula forms, Ó Sé called ‘irrealis’ both past and counterfactual
values, while carefully distinguishing between real-world, temporal uses (Ba dhochtúir
é ‘He was a doctor’) and modal ones (Ba fhearr liom ‘It would be better for me’).
35
Specifically, habituals but not statives allow agentive adverbials (Whenever he comes,
John willingly washes the dishes/*understands the matter), numerical specification (He
always rings the bell three times/*is tall three times), and can occur as perceptual
reports (The witness saw the accused bring a present every day to the victim/*hate the
victim). By contrast, statives but not habituals can be true at a single instant (At the
precise moment when John broke his leg, Ann was at work/*they used to eat dinner)
(Bertinetto 1994: 408–409).
36
The synthetic form cheapaidís in agreement with the full DP subject na fir represents
only one of the archaic features of this text (another one being the past prefix do in do
bhíodh).
37
Diarmaid Ó Sé (personal communication) suggests the useful contrast Bíonn na lipaí
cruinn i gcás na ngutaí cúl ‘The lips are [habitual] round in case of the back vowels’ vs.
Tá cúig ghuta sa Ghaeilge ‘There are [non-habitual] five vowels in Irish’.
82
38
Some northern Ulster varieties regularly replace the future with the present after
negation: Cha dtéid sé ‘He will not go’; when this happens, the present form of the verb
bí is systematically the habitual, so that Cha bhíonn sé is ambiguous between ‘He
generally is not’ and ‘he will not be’ (see Hughes 1994: 640).
39
This formulation may be too strong. Aidan Doyle (personal communication) points
out that ‘historical’ uses of the present (in a narrative framed in the past) employ the
habitual even for events presented as completed by the Reference Time; for example,
Bíonn naomhóg amuigh ó inné ... Tráthnóna déanach bhuail sí isteach ‘A boat is [pres.
hab.] out since yesterday ... last night it came [simple past] in’ (Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s
Allagar na hInise, 1997 [1928], Baile Átha Clíath, An Gúm, p. 322).
40
Note that the coincidence requirement does not necessarily rule out iterations. If a
verb was LEXICALLY frequentative, for example, it could hold as a single event for the
whole Assertion Time, because the verb itself would not denote the single sub-events.
Something similar, if not the same, happens with verbs like knock or sneeze, which can
denote a short, localized series of sub-events (see Binnick 1991: 182).
41
See also Reed (2011: 264), who uses the term ‘completive’ in a slightly more formal
characterization of what she elsewhere calls ‘aorist’ in the Scottish Gaelic system.