The Distribution of Subject Properties in Irish

Abstract

Virtually no one who has thought seriously about language and its structure has been able to avoid using the terms ‘subject’ and ‘object’. This is a remarkable fact - that perceptive and knowledgeable observers have been willing to talk about ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ in very disparate languages and feel reasonably confident that they knew what they were talking about. It is all the more remarkable, then, that in the intellectual tradition represented by the frameworks of ‘Government and Binding’, ‘Principles and Parameters’ and the ‘Minimalist Program’, the notions play no (recognized) role at all. That tradition has always insisted that talk of ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ is either illicit or casual, and that reference to such terms is to be cashed out in terms of more primitive notions (phrase-structural measures of prominence, featural properties of heads, the theory of A-movement and so on).