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Students in this seminar will read a selection of papers by Jim McCloskey, a widely recognized expert in the syntax of Modern Irish. His papers have, since the 1970s, been at the forefront of major developments in theoretical syntax. The aim of the seminar will be therefore to introduce students to elements of syntactic theory and the role that evidence from the Irish language has helped shape the way comparative syntacticians understand the ‘language faculty’ of the human mind. We will cover six topics in six approximately four-hour sessions. These topics are:
1. Clause Structure and Irish VSO Word Order
2. Agreement and Irish Synthetic/Analytic Verb Forms
3. Successive-Cyclicity and Irish relative clauses
4. Subjecthood and Irish ‘Impersonal’ Verbs
5. Parameters and Variation in Irish Dialects
6. Overview: The Shape of Irish Clauses
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COMPARATIVE SYNTAX
