Adjacency and Case Morphology in Scottish Gaelic

Abstract

Legate (2008) proposes that the postsyntactic component of the grammar plays an important role in morphological case phenomena. Therefore, it is predicted that postsyntactic processes like Linearization may affect morphological case assignment. I argue that this prediction is correct by demonstrating that prepositional case in Scottish Gaelic is assigned solely under linear adjacency with P. To account for this, I propose that Morphological Case Assignment is a postsyntactic process derivationally ordered after Linearization, as in Arregi and Nevins 2012 . This accounts for several typologically rare properties, such as the presence of closest conjunct case.