James Mccloskey

University of California, Santa Cruz | UCSC · Department of Linguistics

This article is concerned with the role of syntax in the licensing of sluicing in English. It amends and provides new support for a proposal made by Rudin (2019) in which syntax plays a crucial but circumscribed role: crucial in that antecedents are required; circumscribed in that matching with an antecedent holds only with respect to a proper subp...

In many languages and in a range of circumstances, a pronominal element may appear in a position in which one might have expected to see a gap bound by a clause‐peripheral element (in relative clauses, constituent questions, cleft constructions, and the like). Such elements (often, but not exclusively, personal pronouns) are known as resumptive ele...

An argument for a minimalist and reductionist view of the Direct Object relation, based on observations concerning infinitival clauses in contemporary Irish

at the University of Groningen (2015) led to numerous improvements. I owe a special debt to Vera Gribanova and Boris Harizanov at Stanford, whose ongoing work on head movement and on ellipsis has informed the discussion here throughout. Comments by two reviewers were also very helpful in improving and sharpening the final version.

This article analyzes mismatches between syntactic and prosodic constituency in Irish and attempts to understand those mismatches in terms of recent proposals about the nature of the syntax-prosody interface. It argues in particular that such mismatches are best understood in terms of Selkirk’s (2011) Match Theory, working in concert with constrain...

This paper aims to contribute to the comparative typology of existential constructions by examining Irish existentials in detail. It goes on to engage some of the central theoretical issues raised in that investigation and provides support for the bifurcated analysis of the definiteness restriction proposed by McNally (1992). It identifies what is...

ChomskyNoam. Lectures on government and binding. The Pisa lectures. Studies in generative grammar, no. 9. Foris Publications, Dordrecht and Cinnaminson, N.J., 1981, ix + 371 pp. ChomskyNoam. Lectures on government and binding. The Pisa lectures. Second edition of the preceding. Studies in generative grammar, no. 9. Foris Publications, Dordrecht and...

This book brings together contributions which address a wide range of issues regarding resumption, gathering evidence from a great variety of languages including Welsh, Breton, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, French, Vata, Hebrew, Jordanian and Palestinian Arabic. The topics covered include the interpretive properties of resumptive pronouns and epithets, t...

A review of approaches to verb-initial order in Irish finite clauses and empirical arguments for a parricular (and more or less standard) approach.

Essays reflecting the influence of the versatile linguist David M. Perlmutter, covering topics from theoretical morphology to sign language phonology. Anyone who has studied linguistics in the last half-century has been affected by the work of David Perlmutter. One of the era's most versatile linguists, he is perhaps best known as the founder (with...

This chapter contains section titled:

Introduction: phenomena and issuesEarly treatmentsIssuesPropertiesOpen issuesThe identity of the binding elementParameterizationMovement and resumptionConclusion

This paper examines so-called autonomous forms of the verb in Irish in the context of ongoing work on the syntax and semantics of arbitrary pronominal subjects (on on French; man in German and so on). It argues for the syntactic presence of a phonologically null subject in such constructions and attempts to understand various characteristics of suc...

This paper examines rightward positioning phenomena in Irish and looks particularly at their interaction with the focusing particle féin. It uses that interaction as a probe to distinguish among three theoretical options for explaining such right-edge phenomena.

It has been widely assumed that the preverbal particles of Irish are complementizers. Given the distribution of the particle aL, this assumption provides support for two central claims about WH-movement – that its application is successive-cyclic, and that it is driven by a morphosyntactic feature of the complementizer. However, the claim that aL i...

Virtually no one who has thought seriously about language and its structure has been able to avoid using the terms ‘subject’ and ‘object’. This is a remarkable fact - that perceptive and knowledgeable observers have been willing to talk about ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ in very disparate languages and feel reasonably confident that they knew what they...

The English of northwestern Ireland allows quantifier float of a previously undocumented kind in wh-questions. The quantifier all, though construed with a fronted wh-pronoun, may appear in a position considerably to the right of that pronoun. It is argued that all so stranded marks a position through which a wh-phrase has passed or in which a wh-ph...

The notion of “subject” is fundamental in Aristotelian logic and in almost all Western traditions of thinking about philology and grammar.* It is also fundamental to certain strands of thought within the broad tradition of generative grammar – notably Relational Grammar and Lexical Functional Grammar. However, in the tradition which extends from th...

This 1996 volume brings together ten chapters on the Celtic languages using the insights of principles-and-parameters theory. The leading researchers in the field examine Welsh, Irish, Breton and Scots Gaelic in comparative perspective, making reference to recent work on English, French, Arabic, German and other languages. The editors have provided...

This paper is concerned with one aspect of the syntactic processes which derive VSO order in (Modern) Irish. Analyses which appeal to fronting of the finite verb have played an important role in recent theorizing about the VSO clausal pattern. A question which has resisted resolution, however, is the question of what the target-position for this fr...

This paper presents a novel analysis of Sluicing, an ellipsis construction first described by Ross (1969) and illustrated by the bracketed portion ofI want to do something, but I'm just not sure [what _]. Starting from the assumption that a sluice consists of a displaced Wh-constituent and an empty IP, we show how simple and general LF operations f...

The focus of discussion in this chapter will be the distribution of those items that we have analyzed as being complementizers. It will be particularly concerned with the phenomenon known traditionally as the ‘Double Relative’ construction (see the references in note 8 of Chapter 2). This is the situation (already alluded to several times) in which...

Existential sentences of the type There are cats in the next room pose a classic puzzle of the syntax-semantics interface. Since at least Milsark (1974), linguists working in the broad frame-work of generative grammar have made repeated efforts to understand the syntax of this con-struction and its relation to the semantics and pragmatics, includin...

Thesis--University of Texas at Austin. Vita. Bibliography: leaves 298-309.