Prosody, Focus and Ellipsis in Irish

When we study how phonological representations align with syntactic and semantic representations, we principally study imperfect parallelism.1 Prosodic representations must be to some degree faithful to the syntactic and semantic representations they express (otherwise, prosodic cues would not be as useful as they in fact are in syntactic and semantic processing, Wagner & Watson (2010)). But they must also meet purely phonological requirements, having to do especially with rhythm, balance, and the needs of phonologically dependent elements. Satisfying such requirements often leads to less than perfect parallelism across the systems of representation. This much is a virtual truism. The challenges come in understanding what the mechanisms actually are which guarantee parallelism in the first place and departures from parallelism in the second place. Our goal in this paper is to contribute to the project of understanding these mechanisms. We do that by studying two cases in Irish in which full parallelism fails; the two cases are closely related and they interact with one another in intricate ways. Both involve the special status of subject pronouns in the language and their interaction with the inflected verbs that precede them. Both processes also interact with ellipsis in interesting and contrasting ways and thus provide a way of probing how the mechanisms of ellipsis do their work—the means by which syntactic objects are linked with silence. This is not always taken to be a question on the syntax-prosody interface, but it surely should be; after all, silence is phonological and there is no larger failure of parallelism than that in which a syntactic or semantic representation is mapped to silence.