Resumptivity resumed

I said?(four years ago) that Gaelic doesn’t have resumptive pronouns. However, while scouring William Lamb’s?Scottish Gaelic for unusual uses of?agus, I found these examples, with the resumptive bit in bold.

  • sin an gille a shuidh C?it air (that is the boy who Kate sat upon) (do not try this at home)
  • sin an gille a tha a mh?thair bochd (that is the boy whose mother is ill)

Now, in dictionaries?air?in the first example is indeed treated as a pronoun, though for subcategorization purposes I prefer to treat it as a PP. The second case, a?as possessive pronoun, I’ve been treating as a pronoun, so on my own account what I said about Gaelic was wrong. It may of course be a determiner. The evidence for this off the top of my head is that unlike the small class of prenominal adjectives deagh, droch, s?r and so on,?the possessives?mo, do, a and so on can’t co-occur with the article?an or with?gach, and that unlike nouns in the genitive they go before the possessor rather than after the possessor. Pronoun or determiner, they have type N/N in categorial grammar.

Apparently there are resumptive pronouns in Irish, but I don’t have enough Irish to make sense of the literature I’ve seen on the subject, so I shall stop here.

2 thoughts on “Resumptivity resumed”

  1. Yes, Irish certainly does have resumptive pronouns. They are obligatory in so-called ‘indirect’ relative clauses. Here are some an indirect relative clause:

    Sin an buachaill ar shuigh C?it air.
    (That is the boy who Kate sat upon.)

    Sin an buachaill a bhfuil a mh?thair tinn.
    (That is the boy whose mother is ill.)

    For comparison, here are some ‘direct’ relative clauses which do not have (and cannot have) a resumptive pronoun:

    Sin an buachaill a shuigh ar Ch?it.
    (That is the boy who sat upon Kate.)

    Sin an buachaill at? tinn.
    (That is the boy who is ill.)

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