Post-Syntactic Movement and the Old Irish Verb

Abstract

The placement of second position clitics has been analysed as involving syntactic movement, morphological transpositions, or prosodic inversion. This paper argues that a syntactic treatment of the Old Irish verbal complex is untenable and that facts about allomorphy and phonological phrasing preclude a prosodic inversion analysis. I show how application of a morphological transposition operation (the Morphological Merger operation in a Distributed Morphology framework) not only to overt clitics in the language, but also to the functional head Force, provides a unified analysis of this highly intricate system.