VSO Order and Weak Pronouns in Goidelic Celtic

Abstract

This article examines the placement of weak pronominal objects in Goidelic Celtic. These elements appear in a far-right position in the clause, in spite of their prosodic lightness. Previous analyses have put this phenomenon down to either a language and construction specific rule, or to a side effect of clausal organisation. The article examines the most articulated current version of the latter option, shows how it suffers from serious empirical and conceptual problems and develops in its place an approach in which the pronouns remain internal to the verb phrase with their precise position determined by prosodic factors. This collapses the surprising behaviour of weak pronouns in Goidelic with that of weak pronouns in Germanic. The apparent differences in the positioning of pronouns between the two language families derive from independent aspects of clausal architecture. The new approach uses a much less articulated clausal structure but an enriched view of the syntax-prosody interface.