Microvariation in Celtic Relatives

1. Introduction: The syntactic effects of relativisation in Welsh, Irish and Scottish Gaelic vary in a complex and potentially baffling way between the languages and across their dialects. The crucial components of this variation are resumptivity, " wh-agreeing " complementizers, a differential treatment of locality domains, and variation in the availability of pied-piping. In this paper we argue that the complexity reduces to two factors: (i) the featural composition of C and (ii) the presence of an EPP feature in C which is sensitive only to phonological content. We first address the variation across these three languages, and then focus on variation in the availability of pied-piping in three dialects of Scottish Gaelic. 2. Interlanguage variation: Scottish Gaelic (SG) and Modern Irish (MI) are closely related, with Welsh (W) being a more distant relation. However, both MI and W allow resumptive dependencies , while SG does not (McCloskey 1990, Rouveret 2001); SG and MI allow " chains " of complementizers in long distance wh-constructions, in contrast to Welsh (Adger and Ramchand 2001); SG and MI differ in the domains into which these relative dependencies can reach, SG allowing relativisation into PP in contrast to MI; finally, MI allows matrix resumptive dependencies , but W does not (Harlow 1981). We develop a theory of relativisation for Celtic which accounts for this inter-language variation by exploiting just three syntactic features: [Λ], which correlates with the semantic interpretation of a CP as a predicate; [Var], a feature which marks the foot of the relative dependency; and [Ccase], a feature which is related to case on DPs and implicated in the interpretation of CP as an argument. Crucially, none of these strategies makes use of movement to a specifier of C, so relative dependencies are always in situ dependencies constructed via Agree and not Move (but see section 3). We show that in situ dependencies are constructed in these languages by Λ-bearing Cs Agreeing with pronominals lexically specified as [uΛ]. [Var] and φ are in complementary distribution on [uΛ] pronouns so that a dependency triggered by C[Λ] terminates in a φ-featured ('resump-tive') pronoun while one triggered by C[Var, uΛ] terminates in a non-agreeing pro. This accounts for the anti-agreement effect in Celtic relativisation (McCloskey 1990). The presence of Ccase determines whether the CP is an argument, and thereby incompatible with predicative status. Thus, if a C bears both Ccase and Λ, Λ must be …