The Coordinate Structure Constraint: evidence from Irish

Previously.

Ross’s 1967 MIT thesis Constraints on Variables in Syntax introduced, among other things, the Coordinate Structure Constraint, which is a generalization of the intuitive notion that coordinators (in English, “and”, “but”, “or” and so on) coordinate nouns with nouns (“fish and chips”), verbs with verbs (“come and go”) to exclude sentences like “Whose tax did the nurse polish her trombone and the plumber compute?”

While keeping my eyes peeled for examples of non-constituent coordination in Gaelic, and I should note that I have a blogpost in preparation with examples from William Lamb’s Scottish Gaelic, including the constructions that are examples of “cosubordination”, I’ve been reading M?che?l ? Siadhail’s?Learning Irish, which has some examples of what the author calls “idiomatic uses of?agus“. These first five coordinate non-constituents:

Bh? Br?d ann agus ? tinn. (1)

T? C?it ansin agus leabhar m?r aici.?(2)

D’imigh M?irt?n amach agus gan aon ch?ta air.?(3)

Bh? an bosca ansin is m? ag t?ocht abhaile. (4)

Bh? an l? gearr is th? ag imeacht thart mar sin. (5)

(1) coordinates NP + existential ANN with NP + ADJ. (2) coordinates NP + ADV with NP + PP. (3) coordinates ADV with PP. (4) coordinates NP + ADV with NP + small clause. (5) coordinates NP + ADJ with NP + small clause. Sadly there are no counterexamples of uses that are unidiomatic. is also shows up in constructions with chomh (like Gaelic cho, which is similar):

chomh s?sta is a bh? M?irt?n (6)

“as pleased as Martin was”. Here is coordinates ADJ with a direct relative clause.

There are also some non-coordinative-looking uses:

An bhfuil s? m?le as seo go Carna? T? agus deich m?le! (7)

T? m? ag imeacht anois. T? agus mise! (8)

Is maith liom an ?it seo. Is maith agus liomsa! (9)

Any account of coordination in Irish at least has to be able to cope with examples (1) to (6). I hunt on for examples in Gaelic.

horsey compounds

For example the adjectival suffix -each was interpreted as the noun each (an old word for ‘horse’), resulting a large number of unusual horsey compounds.

(from Elaine U? Dhonnchadha’s PhD thesis,?http://doras.dcu.ie/2349/)

Each is the normal Scottish Gaelic word for horse; Irish prefers?capall, which in Scotland means “mare”, but has been borrowed into English. Capercaillie comes from?capall-coille, or “mare of the woods”.

Dependency structures in Irish Gaelic

Quick note to say that Teresa Lynn at DCU has been working on a project based on dependency treebanks for Irish. This is relevant to this blog because Irish Gaelic is very closely related to Scottish Gaelic and much of the grammar is similar, and there has also been work in the past (Clark and Curran 2007, Table 2, for example) on deriving dependency structures from CCG lexical structures.

Here are two papers I’ve had a quick look at: