A further difference between these two languages and Welsh is the availability of pied-piping. In Welsh, the pied-piping pattern is available in prepositional wh-questions, as illustrated below.
136 (62) O le dach chi ’n dod?
from where be.PRES.2P you PROG come
‘Where do you come from?’
In contrast, pied-piping does not seem to be available in Irish and Scottish Gaelic.
We first look at the Irish situation, discussed in McCloskey (2002: 213-218). In Irish, the default pattern of prepositional wh-questions is the resumptive structure, as illustrated below.
(63) Cé a raibh tú ag caint leis? Irish who aN were you PROG talk with-him
‘Who were you talking to?’ (McCloskey 2002: 213)
However, McCloskey (1990) observes that, beside (63) above, a pied-piping-like pattern is also possible under certain conditions (see below for these conditions):
(64) Cé leis a raibh tú ag caint? Irish who with-him aN were you PROG talk
‘Who were you talking to?’ (McCloskey 2002: 213)
The above example resembles the Welsh (and English) pied-piping pattern at first sight. However, McCloskey (2002) argues that the identification of (64) with pied-piping as deriving from movement is mistaken. In fact, the possibility of (64) is limited by a number of prosodic factors. McCloskey points out that the sequence of wh-expression and inflected preposition forms a single prosodic unit. Another element cannot intervene the sequence of
wh-expression and preposition. For instance, the modifier eile ‘other’ must appear after the
inflected preposition as in (65a), not before the preposition as in (65b).
(65) a. Cá leis eile a mbeifeá ag dúil? Irish what with-it other aN you-would-be PROG expect
‘What else would you expect?’
b. * Cá h- eile leis a mbeifeá ag dúil? what other with-it aN you-would-be PROG expect (McCloskey 2002: 215)
137 Furthermore, a wh-expression must be stressless and monosyllabic. The normal word for ‘what’ is goidé in Northern varieties. According to McCloskey, since goidé is disyllabic and has a stress on its second syllable, it cannot be used before the inflected preposition, as illustrated in (66b). The monosyllabic form cá is used instead, as in (66a).
(66) a. Cá leis a ndearna tú é? Irish what with-it aN did you it
‘What did you do it with?’ b. * Coidé leis a ndearna tú é?
what with-it aN did you it (McCloskey 2002: 214)
Given the above prosodic restrictions, McCloskey views this phenomenon as ‘PP- preposing’. McCloskey further observes that (64) above is more akin to the phenomenon called ‘swiping’ in Merchant (2002) than pied-piping. Swiping is a name for the reversed word order of wh-word and preposition under sluicing, as illustrated in (58).
(67) She spoke to somebody, but I don’t know who to. (McCloskey 2002: 214)
Merchant proposes that this word order inversion involves prosodic incorporation of D (a wh- word) into P at the PF interface (see 5.5 for Merchant’s proposal on this phenomenon in more detail). McCloskey (2002) proposes that the Irish case as in (64) also involves prosodic incorporation as in swiping, producing an output as in (68):
(68) D
D P
cé leis (McCloskey 2002: 215)
I will not go into McCloskey’s analysis in detail. However, there are two differences here between Irish and Welsh. First, Welsh shows no prosodic restriction, unlike Irish, and pied-piping is the default pattern in prepositional wh-questions. Second, and more crucially, Welsh differs from Irish in the respect that a preposition precedes a wh-expression in a bare
138 form not an inflected form. Therefore, it is not plausible to analyse the Welsh pied-piping sentence like (62) above as PP preposing which involves prosodic incorporation. Moreover, as the preposition shows no inflection in Welsh, there is no possible resumptive element in pied-piping. Without an additional assumption, pied-piping in Welsh should be analysed as an instance of phrasal movement of PP.
We turn to the Gaelic case, documented in Adger (2010, 2011). As in Irish, Gaelic seems to allow the both patterns. An inflected preposition may sit in the clause final position as illustrated in (69), or between wh-expression and complementizer as in (70).
(69) a. Cò a bhruidhinn thu ris? Gaelic who C talk.PAST you to.3MS
‘Who did you talk to?’ (Adger 2011: 362) b. Cò a’ chaileag a bha thu a’ bruidhinn ris?
which the girl C be.PAST you at speak with.3MS
‘Which girl were you talking to?’ (Adger 2011: 436) (70) a. Cò ris a bhios Calum a’ bruidhinn? Gaelic who to.3MS C be.FUT Calum at speak
‘Who will Calum be speaking to?’ (Adger 2010) b. Cò am boireannach ris am bi Calum a’ bruidhinn?
who the woman to.DEF C be.FUT.DEP Calum at speak
‘Which woman will Calum be speaking to?’ (Adger 2010)
Adger points out that the preposition ris in (70a) inflects for gender, person and number,52 but
ris in (70b) with a D-linked wh-phrase is a preposition inflects only for the definiteness of
their complement. Putting aside the details of Gaelic prepositional system, the second difference mentioned above for Irish can be maintained for Gaelic examples in (70). The preposition follows wh-expressions is in the inflected form ris not in the bare form ri, which crucially differs from pied-piping in Welsh.
In summary, existence of multiple wh-questions and pied-piping in Welsh suggests that Welsh makes use of the Move operation alongside the Merge operation, contrary to Adger and Ramchand (2005). In 4.5.1, we saw that the superiority effect seems to be observed in
52
In Gaelic, a third-person masculine singular is the default form. In (70b), the preposition ris does not show gender agreement with the fronted wh-phrase. See Adger (2011) for details.
139 Welsh multiple wh-questions, and the use of resumptive structure is preferable with the D- linked pa-phrases compared to non-D-linked wh-expressions. 4.5.2 showed the difference on the prepositional wh-questions between Welsh and other two Celtic languages. The occurrence of preposition at the left of wh-expression in a bare form in Welsh suggests that it is a genuine case of pied-piping that involves a phrasal movement of PP.
4.6 Conclusion
This chapter presented the PF feature checking account on P-stranding in Welsh. I argued that the availability of P-stranding depends on the availability of PF checking between a P head and its complement. I assumed that P in Literary Welsh possesses AGR-features, but P in Colloquial Welsh does not. If PF feature checking of AGR-features takes place between a P head and its DP complement, that DP will be unable to move out of the complement position. This is the situation in Literary Welsh. In prepositional relatives, a wh-operator is Merged in the specifier of P, and the EPP requirements on v and C are satisfied by movement of that operator following cyclicity. In wh-questions, the EPP requirements is satisfied by movement of the entire PP, which does not break the PF checking relation between P and its complement. In Colloquial Welsh, however, PF feature checking does not hold between P and its complement due to the lack of AGR-features on P. Therefore, a complement of P can be extracted, which makes P-stranding possible in this variety.
140 CHAPTER 5: