Belfast English and Standard English PDF

BELFAST ENGLISH AND
STANDARD ENGLISH
OXFORD STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE SYNTAX
Richard Kayne, General Editor
Principles and Parameters of Syntactic Saturation

Gert Webelhuth
Verb Movement and Expletive Subjects in the
Germanic Languages
Sten Vikner
Parameters and Functional Heads: Essays in
Comparative Syntax
Edited by Adriana Belletti and Luigi Rizzi
Discourse Configurational Languages
Edited by Katalin E. Kiss
Clause Structure and Language Change
Edited by Adrian Battye and Ian Roberts
Belfast English and Standard English: Dialect
Variation and Parameter Setting
Alison Henry
BELFAST ENGLISH AND
STANDARD ENGLISH
Dialect Variation and
Parameter Setting
ALISON HENRY
New York Oxford

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1995
Oxford University Press
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Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi
Kuala Lumpur Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo
Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town
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and associated companies in
Berlin Ibadan
Copyright © 1995 by Alison Henry
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Henry, Alison.
Belfast English and standard English : dialect variation and
parameter setting / Alison Henry.
p. cm.—(Oxford studies in comparative syntax)
Includes bibliographical references and index,
ISBN 0-19-508291-5
ISBN 0-19-508292-3 (pbk.)
1. English language—Dialects—Northern Ireland—Belfast.
2. Belfast (Northern Ireland)—Social conditions.
T. Title.
II. Series.
PE2589.B44H46 1995 427'. 94167—dc20
94-8751
246897531
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For Mark Henry
This page intentionally left blank
Preface
One of the goals of linguistic theory is to establish the extent to which

all languages are similar, and the boundaries within which they may dif-
fer. This book is a study of how the syntax of a non-standard dialect of
English differs from standard English. The analysis presented is under-
taken within the Principles and Parameters framework, but it is hoped
that it will also be of interest to those working in other frameworks, or
interested simply in a description of the grammar of Belfast English,
something which has not hitherto been available. With this in mind,
each chapter begins with a description of the differences between
Belfast English and standard English in relation to the structure being
considered, before going on to consider their analysis.
This is, to the best of my knowledge, one of the few wide-ranging
studies of a non-standard dialect of English that has been undertaken
within the Principles and Parameters framework; indeed, even article-
length studies are very few. This is at first sight very surprising, given
the vast amount of attention that has been devoted to standard English,
and the potential contribution to the theory of studies of closely related
varieties of language, as evidenced by the large quantity of fruitful
research on the Romance languages, and on the Scandinavian lan-
guages. A rich source of information has thus been largely unavailable
to linguists hitherto; indeed, not only have treatments within the Princi-
ples and Parameters framework been unavailable, but, because of the
low status generally accorded to non-standard dialects, even descriptive
accounts have not been compiled. It is possible to find out something
about a standard language like English by looking at descriptive or ped-
agogical grammars; but such grammars have not in general been written
viii PREFACE
for non-standard varieties, which have often been regarded simply as

degenerate versions of the standard (see Milroy & Milroy 1991).
Although this book discusses a particular variety of English, that spo-
ken in Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, many of the features dis-
cussed occur in other varieties. Thus a number of them occur in
Hiberno-English in general—for example, inversion in embedded ques-
tions—and others are also found in some North American dialects, for
example for to, which has also been documented in the Ozarks and the
Ottawa Valley, possibly as a result of emigration. It should thus be of
interest to those working on other non-standard or regional varieties of
English.
Earlier versions of Chapters 2 and 3 of this book were presented as
papers at the Linguistics Association of Great Britain Conference, and I
am grateful to audiences there for much useful feedback. Chapter 4 is
adapted from a paper which appeared in Natural Language and Linguis-
tic Theory (Henry 1992).
I am very grateful to Jim McCloskey, Nigel Duffield, Sten Vikner,
Fritz Beukema, Marcel den Dikken, David Pesetsky, and Angelika van
Hout for helpful comments and discussion on the topics considered in
the book.
Contents
1. Introduction 3
2. Subject-Verb Agreement 16
3. Overt-Subject Imperatives 45
4. For-To Infinitives 81
5. Inversion in Embedded Questions 105
6. Subject Contact Relatives 124
7. Conclusion 136
Notes 759
References 142
Index 147
BELFAST ENGLISH AND
STANDARD ENGLISH
1
Introduction
The Study of Dialect Variation
One of the major goals of linguistic theory is to establish what is uni-

versal in human language, and what are the limits on linguistic varia-
tion, that is, in how far and in what ways the grammars of speakers may
differ from one another.
One way of approaching this question is to look at languages which
are superficially very different from one another, and to find out to what
extent there are true deep-seated differences between the languages, and
how these differences can be accounted for. A complementary approach
is to look at closely related languages or dialects and to examine the
degree of variation that is possible between grammars which are in
many other ways similar. The latter approach has been used produc-
tively in relation to Romance and Scandinavian languages and dialects,
but there has been comparatively little work in this framework on
dialects of English, where most research has been on the standard vari-
ety of the language. In this book, we consider how a non-standard vari-
ety of English, Belfast English, differs from the standard language.
The study of dialect variation presents a particular challenge to a
view of language which sees the ways in which languages may vary as
being highly restricted. The Principles and Parameters approach to
grammar views human language as essentially invariant, with the possi-
ble ways in which grammars may vary from one another being limited
to the setting of a small number of innately specified parameters along
which language may vary. Dialects at first sight do not seem to vary
from one another in precisely the way this view would predict.
3
4 BELFAST ENGLISH AND STANDARD ENGLISH
Although some researchers have hoped that studying dialect variation

will enable us to find dialects which differ in a single parameter, this
search has not been easily fulfilled, and it will not be fulfilled in this
study. Rather, we will show that Belfast English differs from standard
English in a number of ways, but these are not all derivable from a sin-
gle difference in parameter setting.
Moreover, within Belfast English, indeed within a single construction
such as the imperative, there are, as shown in Chapter 3, a number of
different grammars possible.
What we will show, however, is that the different possible grammars
all result from parameter setting differences permitted by Universal
Grammar. That is, there is more variability in grammars between stan-
dard and dialect, and even within dialect speakers, than one might
expect. But the differences all clearly reflect possible choices of para-
meter setting, rather than, for example, the presence or absence of lan-
guage-particular rules.
What is noticeable about the differences between Belfast English and
standard English is that, in many cases, they derive from different char-
acterisations of particular lexical elements, rather than of a functional
category as a whole. Thus, for example, Belfast English infinitives dif-
fer from standard English infinitives in that for can be a clitic in the for-
mer but not in the latter. Imperatives differ in that the imperative mor-
pheme, which appears in C, can be strong in Belfast English, forcing
movement of the verb to C. The effect of this difference is that in
imperatives, the main verb can raise to C as in the V2 languages; but,
because this difference is tied to the property of a specific item, the
imperative morpheme, rather than being a property of C holding
throughout the language ("The V-feature of C is strong"), the superfi-
cial difference between the dialects is not very great: overall the word
order patterns are the same, except in imperatives.
The co-existence of different grammars in a speech community raises
interesting questions about how language acquisition proceeds; children
will usually have input from more than one adult, and the adults whom
they hear will often have grammars with different parameter settings. It
can be observed that where this is the case, children do not necessarily
develop a grammar which covers all of the data in the input to which
they have been exposed. Rather, they appear to select the parameter set-
ting which is compatible with the majority of, but not necessarily all,
the data in the input. This shows that language learning is strongly
Introduction 5
determined by innate factors; learners do not add language-particular

rules which would enable them to develop grammars which could cover
all the data, nor do they necessarily select the parameter setting which
would cover the entire range of possibilities exemplified in the input.
Rather, from the small range of possible grammars permitted by UG,
they select the one which best fits the data. For a detailed discussion of
this process of selection, see Chapter 3, where we discuss Belfast Eng-
lish imperatives.
Apart from imperatives, Belfast English differs from standard Eng-
lish in a number of other interesting ways, which will also be discussed
in detail in subsequent chapters.
Subject-verb agreement is optional:
(1) The eggs is/are cracked.
(2) The machines works/work well.
Inversion is possible in embedded questions, whereas it is restricted

to matrix questions in standard English
(3) I wonder did they go.
(4) She asked had anybody called.
For to is possible before infinitives:

(5) They seem for to be late.
(6) I want them for to win.
Relative clauses where the subject is relativised occur without overt

relative pronouns
(7) We had a window looked out on that side.
(8) There's a woman in our street went to Spain last year.
and certain finite subordinate clauses occur with null subjects, in what is
otherwise a non-pro-drop language.
(9) They were lucky got away.
(10) You were as well took the job when you were offered it.
The analysis of these constructions is relevant to a number of current
issues within syntactic theory in general and English syntax in particular.
A number of characteristics of English which have been claimed to
derive either from universal principles or from parameter settings hold-
ing for English seem to differ in Belfast English. Thus, it has been
claimed (by Rizzi & Roberts 1989 and Vikner 1991, among others) that
the unavailability of inversion in embedded questions in English derives
from the Wh-criterion (Rizzi 1991; for a discussion of this feature, see
Chapter 5). Although the Wh-criterion seems otherwise to apply in
Belfast English just as in standard English, inversion is freely available
in embedded questions in Belfast English, calling into question this
analysis unless some other factor can be brought in to account for its
availability. Similarly, a number of accounts have been proposed for
why main verbs in English (except be and have) never raise out out of
VP: for example, Pollock (1989) suggests that they cannot assign their
0-roles from higher positions because AGR is weak in English; but as
shown in Chapter 3, Belfast English imperatives seem to show such
movement, and any account of why verb raising is not generally possi-
ble must therefore take account of the fact that it does happen in this
case. Examining such structures in detail will allow us to see whether
the analyses proposed for standard English are correct, but additional
factors in Belfast English mean that the facts look different, or whether
in fact the standard English analyses do not hold up when faced with
data from another dialect.
Before we go on to look in detail at the differences between Belfast
English and standard English (and within Belfast English), it will be
useful to set the scene by considering some background issues. Thus,
although the study is concerned with the grammars of contemporary
speakers of Belfast English rather than the historical development of
that variety, it will be useful to consider briefly the historical and geo-
graphical background of this variety. This is done in the next section.
We also need to outline briefly the theoretical framework in which the
study is undertaken; this will take up a later section, titled "Principles
and Parameters Theory." The final section of this chapter considers the
special methodological issues and problems which arise in working on
non-standard dialects.
Belfast English: Some Background Information
Belfast English is the variety spoken in and around Belfast, the capital
of Northern Ireland. Belfast is a major commercial and industrial centre
with a population of some half a million people.
English speakers in Belfast are largely monolingual, and there is no
Introduction 1
community of native Irish speakers in the area, although there is a small

but growing number of Irish-medium schools for children whose par-
ents wish them to be educated in Irish. For most Belfast English speak-
ers Irish is a subject learned at secondary school if at all; there are few
bilingual speakers, and thus any influence from Irish almost certainly
derives from historical, rather than contemporary, contact between the
two languages.
The English spoken in this area of Ireland descends largely from that
introduced by the plantations of Ireland, when English and Scottish set-
tlers came to Ireland in the seventeenth century, bringing their language
with them. The local population at that time was Irish-speaking, and
indeed quite a few of the settlers learned Irish. The use of Irish in the
Belfast area had however died out by the end of the nineteenth century.
The plantation took place on an extremely large scale; the census
returns for 1658/9 show that of a total population of 31,221 in Antrim
and Down, the counties which border Belfast, 13,614 were of English
or Scottish descent. Although many of the settlers learned Irish, the
introduction of such a large number of English speakers, who held the
economic and political power, marked the beginning of the decline in
the use of Irish in this area (Patterson 1880).
Rural Ulster speech is generally considered to consist of two main
dialects, Ulster Scots, which is closely related to Scottish English, in the
North-east, and the Central or Mid-Ulster dialect, which shows more
influence of Irish. Belfast, as the major city in Northern Ireland, has
attracted such an influx of population in search of work from many
other areas that its dialect cannot be clearly defined as belonging to
either of these two groups.
In relation to standard English and some other varieties, Belfast Eng-
lish can be considered to be a conservative one (it is indeed part of the
local folklore that we speak English as it was spoken in Shakespearean
times). Thus, some of the constructions discussed here were used in ear-
lier forms of standard English, and they have been retained only in
Belfast English and other conservative dialects today. For example the
use of for to with infinitives was found in earlier stages of English. Fur-
thermore, the co-occurrence of wh-elements with that and inversion in
imperatives are also found in earlier stages of standard English.
One of the interesting characteristics of Belfast English is that,
although Belfast is known to be in many ways a divided society, with
often little contact between the Protestant and Catholic communities,
Belfast English is not distinguished, either phonologically or grammati-

cally, along religious lines. All of the constructions discussed in this
book are used by both communities, and where there is any distinction
in usage, it is between working and middle-class speakers or older and
younger speakers, rather than along religious lines. It is simply not pos-
sible to tell to which community persons belong by how they speak
English. Belfast English is thus very much something which the com-
munities have in common, something which tends not to be noticed
because of two factors: First, the fact that the allegiance of one commu-
nity to England (and standard English), or sometimes to the rural Ulster
Scots dialect with its clear Scottish roots, and the other to Ireland (and
Irish) means that the local variety of speech is championed by no one.
Second, and perhaps more important, this is a variety of English which
has little status and which is not officially recognised. Schools, both
Protestant and Catholic, devote a great deal of time to the teaching of
"correct" (=standard) English, and the ability to use standard syntax is
considered to be a mark of education; conversely the use of local syntax
is considered a badge of the lack of education. Many people consider it
quite legitimate to discriminate against users of local syntax in employ-
ment. Milroy & Milroy (1991) quote the following letter from a local
newspaper as typical. The issue in question is the use of non-standard
past tense forms; many verbs have different past tense and past partici-
ple forms from those found in standard English. For example, the past
tense of see is seen and the past participle saw, whereas the opposite is
the case in standard English (for details see Finlay 1988).
For many years I have been disgusted with the bad grammar used by
school-leavers and teachers too sometimes, but recently on the lunch-
time news, when a secretary, who had just started work with a firm, was
interviewed her first words were: "I looked up and seen two men" etc.
It's unbelievable to think, with so many people out of work, that she
could get such a job. ("Have went," Saintfield, N. Ireland)
Although there are now a few government-funded Irish-medium

schools in Belfast, there is no right to be educated in the local dialect of
English; all education is based on standard British English. Children
who use the structures discussed in this book in school work, with a
couple of exceptions that have acquired the status of a local standard,
will simply be marked wrong. Things appear to be changing slowly,
with the requirement in the new Common Curriculum that children
Introduction 9
learn something about local dialects, and a local dialect dictionary is

being compiled; but there is a long way to go before Belfast English is
seen as anything other than a deviation from the standard. Hence, the
disbelief with which most local people greeted the news that I was writ-
ing a book about the grammar of Belfast English; in their view, it hadn't
got any.
This book, then, is about a dialect which is widely spoken but which
has no official status; thus, studies of its syntax have been few. There
has been some excellent sociolinguistic work on Belfast English (see
Milroy 1980, Milroy 1981), but much of it has focussed on phonology.
It is hoped that, apart from the analyses it discusses, this book will
make available a description of the syntactic characteristics of Belfast
English which will be of value also to readers outside the focus of Prin-
ciples and Parameters theory.
Principles and Parameters Theory

This book is written within the framework of Principles and Parameters
theory, in particular its latest version, the Minimalist program of Chom-
sky (1992). This theory views language as largely invariant, with the
differences between languages deriving from choices between a small
number of innately determined parameter settings.
It is beyond the scope of this introduction to provide a wide-ranging
account of that theory, and the reader is referred to works such as Rad-
ford (1988) and Haegeman (1991) for comparatively introductory
accounts, or to Chomsky (1986, 1992) for more technical statements of
the nature of the theory. However, it is worthwhile to draw attention
here to some relevant aspects of the framework which will be assumed
in this book, particularly insofar as they represent differences between
the Minimalist approach and earlier approaches with which some read-
ers may be more familiar.
The only levels of representation recognised within the Minimalist
approach are "interface levels," where the linguistic system interfaces
with other systems: these are the level of Phonological Form, where it
interfaces with the pronunciation system, or at Logical Form, where it
interfaces with other cognitive systems. Thus, there is no level of D-
structure or S-structure as assumed in earlier models.
Chomsky (1992) argues that all languages are similar at Logical
Form; the differences between languages result from the fact that some
processes apply earlier in some languages than others; those processes
which apply early are overtly visible, while those which apply later are
not.
While earlier models envisaged words being introduced from the lex-
icon in their base form, and moving in the course of the derivation to
acquire Case-marking or to pick up affixes, the Minimalist model envis-
ages words being inserted from the lexicon in their fully specified,
inflected form, and moving for checking to affixes; once checked, the
affixes delete. What determines whether movement for checking
applies early or late is whether the affix in question is weak or strong. If
strong, it is visible at PF if undeleted, and it will be identified as an
unattached affix at that level, causing the derivation to crash; therefore,
where a functional element is strong, it triggers overt movement, before
what is called spell-out. If it is weak, movement does not occur until
LF.
The reason that movement is delayed until LF if possible is the Pro-
crastinate Principle: movement occurs as late as possible, LF movement
being in some sense "less costly" than overt movement and therefore
preferred.
Another important principle with a "least effort" flavour within Mini-
malism is that movement only occurs if forced; there is no optional
movement.
An important difference between the Minimalist approach and other
frameworks which will be relevant for our study here relates to Case.
Earlier approaches incorporated a Case filter operating at surface struc-
ture, which excluded structures in which an overt Noun phrase had not
Case. At S-structure, in order to have Case, NPs had to be in a Case
position, or be part of a chain of which one element was in such a posi-
tion.
While the Minimalist approach requires Case to be checked, this can
be done either in the overt syntax or later. Since NPs are inserted from
the lexicon with all their inflectional properties, the fact that an NP is
overtly Case-marked does not mean it has to be in a Case position or
part of a Case-marked chain. It can raise to check Case at LF, subjects
raising to SPEC/AGRS and objects to SPEC/AGR0. As we shall see, this
seems to work well for Belfast English where in imperatives, subjects
can be in a non-Case-marked position at S-structure, something which
would have presented a problem in earlier approaches to syntax.
Introduction 11
In accordance with the Minimalist proposals, the phrase structure

configuration we will be assuming in our discussions is as shown in
(11), with a range of functional projections above the verb phrase.
Since the Minimalist approach is relatively new, some areas, for

example that of infinitives, have not received extensive treatment in the
new framework. In discussing these areas we will also discuss possible
analyses in an earlier framework.
The Minimalist approach presents a particularly restrictive approach
to cross-linguistic variation: language varieties can only differ in rela-
tion to the strength or weakness of the morphological properties of
functional elements; it will thus be interesting to see whether such a
restrictive theory can accommodate the range of variation found
between dialects.
Before we go on to consider this possibility, however, we need to

look at some particular issues involved in the study of non-standard lan-
guages.
Studying Non-Standard Language Varieties
A number of problems arise in working with non-standard dialects,

which do not manifest themselves, at least to the same extent, in study-
ing standard language, and it is worth noting them here.
First, there are problems in relation to obtaining judgements on sen-
tences from native speakers. Speakers of Belfast English are aware that
many of the things they say are regarded as ungrammatical in the pre-
scriptive sense. When asked whether a sentence is grammatical or not,
their first reaction is to say whether they think it would be correct in
standard English. It is of course possible to overcome this in part by
explaining that what one is interested in is what people actually say in
the local variety of speech, not in what is commonly regarded as "cor-
rect" English. There is nevertheless a strong tendency towards what I
have termed "negative overreporting" (Henry 1992), that is, indicating
that structures are ungrammatical when in fact the speaker actually uses
them; it is thus important to check judgements against naturally occur-
ring data where possible, particularly to ensure that structures said to be
ungrammatical have not in fact been so judged simply because they are
non-standard. An example of this occurred when I was studying for to
infinitives; I asked a native speaker whether it was possible to have sen-
tences where for to occurs directly after a verb like want; the speaker
said that sentences like:
(12) I want for to go.
were ungrammatical. But only a few minutes later, he remarked
(13) 1 want for to be helpful.
and this was not just a performance error; when we went back to the
original examples, he agreed that he would use them, although, he
added, "Of course they wouldn't be right."
It is in my view particularly important to make sure that the data are
accurate in studying non-standard dialects, because once data and
analyses are available, they tend to be discussed and reanalysed without
Introduction 13
the original data necessarily being able to be checked. Such checking is

particularly difficult in the case of non-standard dialects, of which few
linguists are native speakers. If I make claims about the grammaticality
of sentences in standard English, or French, or Japanese, there will be
many linguists who can check those judgements against their own intu-
itions; but if I make a claim about Belfast English, this is not the case. I
have therefore tried to be particularly careful in establishing what the
data are, and I have where possible checked grammaticality judgements
against naturally occurring data, by which I mean spoken utterances. I
have not used any data from literary texts; although a number of lin-
guists have used texts in looking at Hiberno-English (see for example
Doherty 1993, Duffield 1993). Although such sources have the advan-
tage of being easily verifiable, I regard them as not necessarily reflect-
ing the actual usage of native speakers. As Milroy & Milroy (1991)
point out, writers attempting to write in a dialect of which they are not
truly native speakers may not know exactly what the rules of the dialect
are, and the language they produce may in fact be ungrammatical. An
example from Belfast English quoted by Milroy & Milroy is the follow-
ing, from a television script based on Gerald Seymour's novel Harry's
Game, where a Northern Irish speaker says:
(14) He's a hard man, but so is you Billy.
In Belfast English, as we will see in some detail in Chapter 2, it is possi-

ble under certain circumstances for the third person singular form of the
verb to occur with all subjects, a process known as singular concord. It
is clearly this process that the writer is trying to reflect here, but in fact
the sentence produced is ungrammatical in Belfast English. Non-agree-
ing third person singular verbs never occur in inverted structures, nor do
they occur with simple personal pronouns
(15) a. The girls is late.
b. *They is late.
c. *Is the girls late?
so that in the sentence used, it is ungrammatical to use is; the agreeing
form are must occur.
(16) He's a hard man, but so are you Billy.
Thus I have avoided literary data sources.
A second point, not unrelated to the unreliability of literary sources,
relates to identifying native speakers of the variety concerned, and

ensuring that one is obtaining judgements from speakers who actually
use the structure in question. Most speakers from Belfast will have
heard people using the structures discussed in this book; but not all of
them will use every one of those structures themselves. Thus for exam-
ple the usage of for to seems to be restricted to middle-aged and older
speakers, and many younger speakers will not use it. Similarly, the lack
of subject-verb agreement discussed above tends not to occur in the
speech of educated middle-class speakers. However, such speakers
often nevertheless think they have sufficient passive competence from
hearing other people use these structures to say when they are used.
Often, of course, they are right, but they can also be quite wrong. Thus
while speakers who do not themselves use non-agreeing verbs are usu-
ally aware that agreement is obligatory with pronouns, many do not
realise that, for speakers in whose grammar this construction actually
occurs, it is also ungrammatical with inversion. It is thus very important
to be sure that judgements come from speakers who actually use the
structure in question.
A final problem relates to the co-occurrence of features in the gram-
mar of individual speakers. If one is interested simply in documenting
the linguistic structures used in Belfast, one can be content with estab-
lishing which structures are used by anyone in the area. But if one is
interested in defining the nature of linguistic competence, it becomes
important to know whether structures can, or must, co-occur in the
grammar of a single speaker. This is particularly important in relation to
parameter setting; one must be sure that structures claimed to be the
result of a single parameter setting in fact necessarily co-occur in the
grammars of speakers. For example, as noted above, subject-verb
agreement sometimes fails to take place in Belfast English; in Chapter
2, we argue that this is because SPEC/TP is available in Belfast English
as a checking position for the subject; in Chapter 5, we consider inver-
sion in embedded clauses, which as we point out might conceivably be
explained along similar lines, since one proposal made in relation to
other languages with similar phenomena is that the subject may be in
this position. We in fact reject this analysis independently on linguistic
grounds, but we note also that even if it were possible to make the
analysis work, we would still have to take into account the fact that
many speakers who use embedded inversion never use non-agreeing
verbs; there might of course be a separate explanation for this, but nev-
Introduction 15
ertheless it is important to note whether features necessarily co-occur in

speakers' grammars; otherwise, one may make misleading analyses in
terms of parameter settings.
It is thus necessary to proceed with some care in studying a non-stan-
dard dialect. With that caution in mind, let us go on to look at some of
the ways in which Belfast English differs from standard English.
2
Subject-Verb Agreement
There is a noticeable difference in subject-verb agreement patterns

between standard English and Belfast English.
In standard English, the -s ending occurs only with third person sin-
gular subjects; in Belfast English, a plural subject NP may occur with a
verb showing the -s ending, a phenomenon pointed out in a number of
sociolinguistic studies, and known as "singular concord" (Policansky
1976, Milroy 1981, Finlay 1988).
(1) a. These cars go/goes very fast,
b. The eggs are/is cracked.
It is not simply the case that the plural endings have a single form, 0,
in standard English but two variants, 0 and -s in Belfast English, -s is
not in free variation with 0, for the occurrence of -s with plural subjects
is restricted in a number of ways. Thus as Milroy (1981) notes, per-
sonal pronouns cannot normally have singular concord.
(2) a. *They goes very fast.
b. *They is cracked.
Singular concord is also generally impossible with inversion.
(3) *Is the eggs cracked?
It will be argued here that "singular concord" verbs are in fact com-
pletely unmarked for agreement; in sentences with singular concord,
AGRS is weak in both V- and N-features, so that the verb does not raise
above Tense before spell-out, and the subject (which we take following
Kitagawa [1986], Koopman & Spottiche [1988], Kuroda [1988J, and
16
Subject- Verb Agreement 17
many others to originate VP-internally) need not raise to SPEC/AGRSP,

but rather moves only as far as SPEC/Tense.
The chapter is organised as follows. In the first section, we outline
the facts of singular concord and show that it is indeed a syntactic phe-
nomenon; we argue that singular concord verbs are in fact completely
unmarked for agreement. Later, under the section titled "Pronouns and
Singular Concord," we discuss the impossibility of singular concord
with certain pronouns. The final section, "Inversion and Singular Con-
cord," examines the interaction of singular concord with I-to-C move-
ment.
What Is Singular Concord?

We begin by outlining the facts of singular concord; next, we establish
that it is a syntactic, as distinct from semantic or pragmatic, phenome-
non; we go on to show that singular concord verbs, which appear to
show third person singular agreement, in fact are unmarked for agree-
ment. We conclude by showing that singular concord is incompatible
with nominative Case and argue that this is because the subject is not in
SPEC/AGRSP, but in the SPEC/Tense P position.
The Facts of Singular Concord

We begin here by outlining the facts of singular concord, since this con-
struction has not previously been described in the syntactic literature.
Singular concord is always optional; that is, it is always possible to
have the plural form of the verb with a plural subject. As pointed out by
Policansky (1976), it would therefore be more correct to use the term
"variable concord"; However, it should be noted that the variability
only exists for plural subjects; thus, while it is possible to use a singular
verb when the subject is plural, as in (1) above, it is not possible to use a
plural verb with a singular subject.
(4) *This car go very fast.
(5) *The egg are cracked.
Singular concord is available for most speakers in all tenses of the

verb which marks agreement; thus in addition to the present, it appears
with the verb be in the past tense (Be is of course the only verb to show
agreement in the past tense in English).
(6) The students was late.

And it also occurs in the "historic present." This is a form of the verb
which is used in storytelling contexts, and it differs from the simple pre-
sent in using -s on the end of the first person singular as well as the third
person.
(7) The girls goes and tells them.

However, while all users of singular concord can use it in the present
tense, for some it is unavailable in the past tense of be and/or the his-
toric present.
As we noted above, singular concord is impossible if the subject is a
simple personal pronoun. However, there are certain circumstances
when pronominal subjects are possible. Thus for example pronouns
which are part of a co-ordination can have a singular verb, provided that
they are not nominative.
(8) Us and them is always arguing.

(9) Him and me goes there every week.
(10) Her and her mother works there.
(11) *We and they is always arguing.
(12) *He and I goes there every week.
(13) *She and her mother works there.
Demonstratives allow singular concord. Note that them, rather than
those, is the distal demonstrative in Belfast English.
(14) These is cracked.

(15) Them is no good.
Moreover, Belfast English has an additional set of plural personal
pronouns not found in standard English, usuns, yousuns, and themuns;
these allow singular concord.
(16) Usuns was late.

(17) Themuns has no idea.
Thus it is not the case that all pronouns require agreement; only a
subset of them does, the series of simple personal pronouns; we, they,
and youse, which is the second person plural pronoun in Belfast Eng-
lish, all require agreement.
As can be seen from the previous examples, singular concord is in
Subject-Verb Agreement 19
general possible both with raising verbs and with verbs which remain in
VP. However, it is impossible with raising verbs if an adverb intervenes
between the subject and verb; whereas (18a) is grammatical, as in stan-
dard English, (18b) is not.
(18) a. The children really are late.
b. *The children really is late.
Thus, it seems to be the case that the adverb position between the sub-
ject and the topmost projection of INFL which exists in English is
unavailable in singular concord.
There is not a general adjacency requirement between subject and
verb in singular concord, however; an intervening adverb is fine with
verbs which remain in the VP.
(19) The children really likes pizza.
(20) These books probably costs a lot.
We noted above that agreement is obligatory where subject-auxiliary

inversion has taken place. Thus the following are ungrammatical
(21) *Is the students here?
(22) *Has the children arrived yet?
Summarising, then, in Belfast English a verb with a third person sin-

gular ending can occur with a plural subject NP, provided the subject is
not a simple personal pronoun, the verb is not inverted, and, if the verb
is one which raises, nothing intervenes between the subject and the
verb.
Singular Concord as a Syntactic Phenomenon

It is important to show at the outset that singular concord is indeed a
syntactic phenomenon. For it is well known that subject-verb agreement
can be influenced by non-syntactic factors; thus, in standard British
English, a syntactically singular NP can have plural agreement if it
refers to a group.
(23) The government is/are planning to resign.
(24) The committee has/have agreed on this.
It might be thought that singular concord is the converse of this; that is,
that a syntactically plural NP identifying a single "group" might have a

singular verb. However, this is not the case. Singular concord occurs
with all types of NP except pronouns, and does not favour any particu-
lar type of NP. Moreover, and more clearly, singular concord structures
differ from the collective plural examples in that they do not behave
like sentences with normal agreement patterns. Thus, as noted above,
inversion is impossible. This is not the case with the collective exam-
ples, which permit inversion.
(25) Are the government planning to resign?
(26) Have the committee agreed on this?
(27) *Is the members planning to resign?
(28) *Has the office-bearers agreed on this?
In addition, the collective examples permit an adverb to intervene
between the subject and verb with raising verbs, whereas as noted
above, this is impossible with singular concord.
(29) The government really are planning to resign.
(30) The committee probably have agreed on this.
(31) *The members really is planning to resign.
(32) *The office-bearers probably has agreed on this.
Thus, there are distinct differences between singular concord cases
and those where group nouns are concerned. In the latter case, there do
not seem to be structural differences between these and sentences show-
ing normal agreement, whereas in the singular concord cases, there are
definite structural differences.
"Singular Concord" as Lack of Agreement Marking

One of the superficially surprising aspects of singular concord is that it
involves the use of a form with an overt inflection, where a base form of
the verb would suffice; rather than appearing in its base form, as in (33),
the verb is in fact gaining an ending, as in (34).
(33) The children shout all the time.
(34) The children shouts all the time.
We will begin by showing that so-called singular concord does not
involve merely substituting the appropriate singular verb for a plural
one; rather, it involves complete lack of agreement marking. (Non-

agreement would therefore be a more accurate term, but we will con-
tinue to refer to it by its traditional name of singular concord.)
We noted above that co-ordinated pronouns may have singular verbs;
now if singular concord simply involved substituting the appropriate
singular verb for the plural, we would expect a first person plural sub-
ject to have a first person singular verb. We can test for this with be, the
only verb in English to have a first person singular which differs from
the first person plural. What we find is that the first person singular
never occurs with a plural subject; apart from the first person plural
form, the only form we find is the third person singular.
(35) *John and me am going.
(36) John and me is going.
(37) *Me and you am supposed to go.
(38) Me and you is supposed to go.
That these are indeed first person plural subjects is seen from their cor-
responding reflexive forms.
(39) John and me kicks ourselves.

(40) Me and you is supposed to help ourselves.
Similarly, -uns pronouns and pronouns which occur as part of a larger

NP always have the third person singular verb form.
(41) *Usuns am happy.

(42) Usuns is happy.
(43) *Us students am very hardworking.
(44) Us students is very hardworking.
This indicates that singular concord is not simply agreement in which

plurality is disregarded; rather, where there is not full agreement the
verb is always in the form normally found with the third person singu-
lar, which appears to be a kind of default agreement.
The lack of agreement raises the question of whether the subject is in
fact in SPEC/AGRSP in this structure. Mohammad (1989), discussing a
similar but not identical agreement phenomenon in Arabic, suggests
that lack of agreement occurs when the subject does not raise to INFL,
remaining rather in VP; thus, it is unable to copy its features to AGR,
and there is no agreement. His analysis suggests that the subject posi-
tion is filled by a null expletive; this will not work for Belfast English,
for two reasons. First, there is otherwise no evidence of null expletives

in Belfast English; just as in standard English only overt expletives are
possible.
(45) a. *NP[e] is a book on the table.
b. There is a book on the table.
(46) a. *NP[e] is surprising that John won.
b. It is surprising that John won.
Second, there is no word order difference between the sentences with

agreement and those without. In Arabic, which is a VSO language,
agreement is obligatory in SVO sentences whereas non-agreement
occurs in VSO sentences, as (47a and b) (from Mohammad 1989) indi-
cate.
(47) a. l-?awlaad-u jaa?uu.
the-boys-NOM came 3pm
b. jaa?a l-?awlaad-u.
came 3sm the-boys-NOM
In these examples, it can be seen that the word order difference

reflects non-raising of the overt subject out of VP where agreement
does not occur. In Belfast English, if the subject were to remain in VP,
there would be VS order with verbs which raise; but this is not the case,
inversion being ungrammatical outside questions (and some impera-
tives: see Chapter 3) and in any case excluded with singular concord.
(48) *Is the eggs cracked.
(49) *Has the students arrived.
Chomsky (1992), commenting on these facts in Arabic, suggests the

following analysis within the Minimalist program: The NP feature of
AGRS can be strong or weak in Arabic, strength or weakness correlating
with agreement or non-agreement. Thus, a verb showing agreement has
a strong NP-feature and triggers obligatory subject-raising in the syn-
tax, whereas one without agreement has a weak NP feature, meaning
that the subject may not raise before spell-out. This analysis has the
same problems as Mohammad's in relation to Belfast English; here, the
word order is identical in both agreement and non-agreement sentences,
showing that the subject has raised to a position above the verb in both
cases; we cannot therefore straightforwardly propose an analysis under
which non-agreeing verbs do not trigger subject raising.
Thus, the details of neither Mohammad's nor Chomsky's analysis

can be wholly adopted for Belfast English. But there is some evidence
that it is similar to the Arabic case in that the subject is not in
SPEC/AGRSP. An important piece of evidence in this respect relates to
Case; singular concord is incompatible with nominative Case-marking.
Now, it is widely accepted that nominative Case is assigned or checked
under Spec/head agreement between the subject NP in SPEC/AGRSP
and AGRS (see for example Chomsky [1989,1992], Mahajan [1990]). If
we can show that nominative Case does not occur in singular concord,
then this may be evidence that the subject is not in (and cannot get by
LF into) a position in which nominative Case is checked; of course, the
subject will have to receive Case-checking in some other way, or the
derivation will crash because it will contain an NP whose Case has not
been checked; we return later to look at how this occurs. For the
moment, let us consider the data relating to nominative Case-marking.
Since singular concord is impossible with simple personal pronouns,
we cannot use these to test for nominative Case-marking. However, we
can again use pronouns which are part of a larger NP.
Co-ordinate pronouns can occur with singular concord, as noted
above. In general, co-ordinated pronouns in Belfast English may occur
either in their strong form (which is morphologically identical to the
accusative, and does not vary for Case), or bear the Case assigned the
whole NP of which they are part. (For a discussion of Case-marking in
English co-ordinates, within a different framework from the one we
adopt here, see Parker, Riley, & Meyer 1988). Thus in Belfast English,
and indeed most varieties of colloquial English, both (50a) and (50b)
are possible.
(50) a. He and I are going.
b. Him and me are going.
Some dialects of English appear to allow strong forms identical to the

nominative.
(51) They went with he and I.
(52) John helped you and I.
but such forms are impossible in Belfast English. Co-ordinated pro-

nouns always occur with either the Case assigned to the whole NP of
which they are part, or in the strong form, which is identical to the
accusative.
In Belfast English, non-agreement is possible only if the pronouns

are not nominative.
(53) a. *He and I is going.
b. Him and me is going.
(54) a. *You and they is going.
b. You and them is going.
Although there is considerable variability in agreement with co-ordi-

nate NPs in English in general (see Cowart 1991), and one pattern
found is agreement with one of the conjuncts, it is clearly not the case in
(54b) that the verb is agreeing with one of the coordinated NPs; for both
you and them should trigger are rather than is.
In structures such as the following also, both the nominative and the
strong form may occur in colloquial English.
(55) a. We students are going.
b. Us students are going.
Again, in Belfast English, singular concord is impossible with the nom-
inative form.
(56) a. *We students is going.
b. Us students is going.
It might be objected here that what we are detecting in examples like
(56a), and also in co-ordinate examples like (53a) and (54a), is not
ungrammaticality as such but rather a sociolinguistic mismatch—with
singular concord being a non-standard feature, and thus sounding
strange when placed together with the formal, prestige form involving
co-ordinate pronouns in the nominative case. It is, however, possible to
rule this out by testing the effect of similar mismatches; thus for exam-
ple the use of non-standard past tenses is highly stigmatised, much more
so than singular concord. But the use of co-ordinated nominative pro-
nouns with such verb forms is judged to be grammatical by native
speakers.
(57) He and I seen them.
(58) We students done the work.
On the other hand, the combination of nominative pronouns with sin-
gular concord is judged to be completely ungrammatical.
Assuming that in the structures in question pronouns may freely
either appear in their strong form or receive the Case assigned to the
Subject-Verb 5
larger NP of which they are part, it seems that singular concord is

incompatible with the nominative Case.
Thus, our analysis of singular concord must exclude the possibility of
nominative Case being checked in this construction. As we noted
above, nominative Case is often considered to be a property of
Spec/head agreement in AGRSP (Chomsky 1989, 1992; Mahajan 1990);
thus, it is not surprising to find that where agreement is absent, so is
nominative Case-marking, and this provides evidence that the subject is
not in these cases in SPEC/AGRSP, where it would have to have nomi-
native Case.
This is not to say that nominative Case-marking is universally incom-
patible with the subject occurring outside SPEC/AGRSP. In examples
(47a and b) from Arabic (repeated below), the NP bears nominative
Case regardless of whether it is in SPEC/AGR,, as in (a), or not, as in
(b), at spell-out. Nominative Case must of course be checked in
SPEC/AGRSP at some stage in the derivation, but this need not be
before spell-out; the subject can raise to SPEC/AGRS at LF, and check
Case at this level.
(47) a. l-?awlaad-u jaa?uu.

the-boys-NOM came 3pm
b. jaa?a l-?awlaad-u.
came 3sm the-boys-NOM
In Belfast English, however, we have seen that nominative Case-

marking is impossible in singular concord. Something must therefore
exclude the checking of Case in SPEC/AGRS at LF; we will argue
below that this is the availability of Case-checking in SPEC/Tense with
singular concord.
A piece of evidence which may help ascertain the position of the sub-
ject can be found in adverb placement, which as mentioned above dif-
fers between sentences with agreement and those without. As Pollock
(1989) notes, in addition to the preverbal adverb position found in both
English and French, there appears to be an additional position between
the subject and the highest head of IP available in English, so that an
adverb may appear between the subject and a verb which raises, as in
(59a) and (60a). Now it is unclear exactly what this position is, or why
adverbs should be restricted to occurring in this or a small number of
other positions. However, the important point in relation to our present
concerns is that the adverb position between the subject and a raised
verb is not available in singular concord.
(59) a. The eggs really are cracked.

b. *The eggs really is cracked.
(60) a. The girls probably have left.
b. *The girls probably has left.
This again indicates that the subject is not in the same position as in
non-singular concord cases.
Note that the unavailability of this adverb position in singular con-
cord is in fact an argument in favour of the existence of such a position;
Baker (1991) argues that there is a single adverb position and that in
sentences where apparently an adverb intervenes between a subject and
raised verb, this is because in fact the verb has not raised. Thus for
Baker the structure of (59) and (60) are identical to that of (61), where
the verb has not raised; but note that in Belfast English, the adverb posi-
tion between the subject and verbs which remain in VP is available in
singular concord structures, indicating that a different structure is
involved.
(61) a. The girls probably like coffee.
b. The girls probably likes coffee.
Thus, we have noted that in singular concord, the subject cannot have
overt nominative Case and the verb is not marked for agreement.
Assuming that the subject originates in VP, it seems that the subject has
not risen as high as SPEC/AGRSP; the question then arises of where the
subject is at spell-out. Apart from the difference just noted, raising
verbs (in the sense of Pollock [1989]) manifest exactly the same pattern
of placement relative to negatives and adverbs with singular concord as
they do in sentences with agreement, indicating that the verb has raised
outofVP.
(62) The eggs is not cracked.
(63) The eggs is probably cracked.
Chomsky (1992) argues that the verbs be and have raise for checking
in the syntax, because they are too weak semantically to be visible for
movement at LF. Since verbs are marked for tense in the singular con-
cord construction, be must be at least as high as the Tense position in
the overt syntax; otherwise, since movement is unavailable at LF, the
V-feature of tense would remain unchecked at LF, and the derivation
would crash. Given the subject-verb order, the subject must occupy a
node higher than Tense. The obvious candidate here is SPEC/Tense P.
A strong argument in favour of this is the dependence of the avail-

ability of singular concord on the choice of tense for some speakers. As
we noted above, although most speakers have singular concord in all
tenses, for some it is restricted to present tense, or restricted to present
and past and excluded in the historic present. Thus while most users of
singular concord find (64), (65) and (66) all grammatical, for a substan-
tial proportion, only (64) and (65) are grammatical, and for a smaller
group only examples in the present tense like (64) are possible.
(64) The teachers is busy.
(65) The teachers was busy.
(66) The teachers goes and tells the Principal about it.
(historic present)
Thus, the availability of singular concord is for some speakers depen-

dent on the content of Tense, suggesting that it is Tense which is
responsible for Case-checking, and that for these speakers only certain
tenses can check Case.
Note that this means that the ability to assign or check Case must be a
property, not just of functional elements (e.g., Tense) but of particular
instantiations of those elements (e.g., the [+pres] Tense morpheme).
Although this increases the number of grammars potentially available,
it is in line with views which see the differences between languages as
restricted to the properties of individual morphological elements in the
lexicon, rather than some abstract global properties of the morphology
in general; and it is going to be necessary in any case to handle the fact
that for example certain complementisers (e.g., for in English: see
Chapter 5) assign/check Case, whereas others do not.
An argument for the availability of Case-marking/checking in
SPEC/Tense in Belfast English comes from the behaviour of negative
polarity items in that dialect. In Belfast English, for some speakers, neg-
ative polarity items can occur in subject position in matrix clauses.
(67) Anybody wouldn't be able to do that.
(68) I was surprised that anybody didn't go.
Such sentences are ungrammatical in standard English, a fact generally
attributed to a universal requirement that NPIs be strictly c-commanded
by a negative operator at S-structure (Linebarger 1987, Laka 1990);
since the subject position is not c-commanded by NEG in matrix
clauses in English, negative polarity items cannot occur there. The
question arises as to how Belfast English manages to escape this
requirement. Duffield (1993) argues that the licensing condition on NPI

items can be reformulated to apply to LF, and is as follows:
(69) Case Condition:
For a Negative Polarity Item to be properly licensed, at least one
Case-marked member of the NPI chain must be c-commanded by a
negative operator.
Now clearly in general in NP chains, only the highest member of the

chain is Case-marked. However, Duffield points out that if, in Belfast
English, there are two potential Case-marking positions for the subject
NP, SPEC/Tense and SPEC/AGRs, then there can be a Case-marked trace
of the subject in SPEC/TP. Duffield argues that in a sentence like: (70)
(70) Any country couldn't stand it.
the negative element c-commands a subject trace in SPEC/TP, as in

(71),
(71) [AGRPAny country i [AGRS couldn't]
0
j] [VP
T tt; [v' stand it ]]]]
and that this subject trace is Case-marked. There is at first sight a prob-
lem with allowing Case-marked positions in NP chains if one is to
maintain the least-effort principle: it may not be clear why an NP would
raise if its Case has already been checked. It may be that the condition
should be re-formulated to refer to potential Case-marking positions
rather than actual traces. Alternatively, it may be that the requirement
that the head of an NP-chain be Case-marked is not strictly correct. An
NP may be able to check Case in one position (e.g., SPEC/Tense) and
then move to another position to check agreement, so that the highest
position of the NP-chain is not the one which is Case-marked in fact.
However, there is another way of interpreting this, without reference
to subject traces. Suppose that, as Duffield argues, the negative element
left-adjoins to TP at LF. Now in Belfast English, if no further raising
takes place at LF, then at LF the negative element will be in the follow-
ing configuration:
(72) [TPNeg[TP Any country [Tcould [VP stand it]]]]
If the subject has already checked Case, and the (non-agreeing) verb
does not require to check agreement, then there is nothing to force LF-
raising; the subject and verb can remain in Tense P, and presumably
AGRS will delete since it will not be required for semantic interpreta-
tion, leaving the LF representation as in (72).
One way to distinguish between these two analyses would be to con-
sider what happens when there is a plural NPI subject. If as we have
argued the subject in singular concord is in SPEC/Tense P, then it
should be impossible to have subject-verb agreement with an NPI sub-
ject. That is, a sentence like (73a) should be impossible, whereas the
corresponding sentence without agreement should be possible.
(73) a. *Any animals aren't coming.
b. Any animals isn't coming.
This seems to be the case; NPIs are only possible with non-agreeing
verbs, indicating that it is not the potential availability of Case-marking
in a certain position, but rather the actual presence of a Case-marked
element in the structure, that is the important issue.
If an approach along these lines is right, then it would be, as Duffield
points out, an important step towards reformulating the conditions on
NPI licensing as LF, rather than S-structure, conditions, for it will be
observed that at S-structure, the negative element is below the negative
polarity item; for example in the following sentences, any is above n 't
and not, which are presumably in Tense (with did) and in NEG, respec-
tively.
(74) a. Any student didn't apply for the job.
b. Any student did not apply for the job.
Under the Minimalist program, S-structure does not exist as a sepa-
rate level and all conditions are interface conditions, applying at LF or
PF. The availability of negative polarity items in subject position in
Belfast English seems to indicate that this is the case; at S-structure the
NPI in subject position is not c-commanded by the negative element, as
would be required by the S-structure condition on negative polarity
items. However, if the condition is an LF condition, and negatives raise
to adjoin to TP, then we have a natural way to account for the possibil-
ity of NPIs in subject position in standard English, and their impossibil-
ity in standard English. NPIs are possible in Belfast English because the
subject can be in SPEC/TP at LF.
That there is a link between singular concord and NPI-licensing in
subject position seems clear from the the fact that the two phenomena
seem to go together in speakers' grammars; those speakers who allow
singular concord also permit NPIs in subject position, and conversely

non-users of singular concord find NPIs in that position strongly
ungrammatical. This is a clear case where careful examination of
dialects or sub-dialects can help to show whether proposed connections
are real or not, and where it is important to check what co-occurrence
constraints there are on dialect features.
Further evidence in favour of the availability of SPEC/TP as a sub-
ject-checking position comes from the availability of object shift in
Belfast English. As we will see in the next chapter, in Belfast English
imperatives, main verbs can raise to C, and this triggers object shift of
weak pronouns.
(75) Give you me immediately that book.
(76) Tell you me always the truth.
Now, Bobaljik & Jonas (1992) argue that the availability of overt
object-shift is dependent upon the availability of SPEC/TP as an inter-
mediate subject-checking position; for raising of the subject from
SPEC/VP to SPEC/AGRsover SPEC/AGR0 and SPEC/TP would vio-
late shortest movement, whereas movement of the subject from
SPEC/VP to SPEC/TP over SPEC/AGR0 would not. Bobaljik and Jonas
link the availability of SPEC/TP as an intermediate checking position to
the marking of both tense and agreement morphology in the same
inflectional paradigm; clearly, this particular distinction will not hold
for Belfast English. Nevertheless, it is significant that Belfast English
does show object shift which, in the Minimalist paradigm, should only
be available overtly where the subject can move to SPEC/TP.
If the subject in Belfast English need not raise to SPEC/AGRS, then
we would expect this to have other effects in the grammar; and indeed it
seems that it does. For, as we shall see in the next chapter, in some
imperatives the subject need not raise out of VP; this is clearly visible
with object-raising, where the object raises in front of the subject.
(77) Throw me quickly you your end there.
(78) Give her always you your full attention.
This lack of raising is particularly evident with unaccusatives; here,
where there is both an auxiliary and a main verb, and therefore the main
verb does not move out of VP, the subject can occur after the main
verb, that is, it can remain in situ.
(79) Be going you out of the door when they arrive.
Similar considerations apply to passives; passive imperatives are

somewhat marginal for pragmatic reasons, but where they occur the
subject can appear in situ after the lexical verbs.
(80) Be elected you president before the end of the year.
We will consider imperatives in detail in the next chapter, arguing

that in this construction the NP-feature of Tense may be weak, and this
coupled with the weakness of SPEC/AGRS means that the subject may
stay in VP.
Chomsky's Minimalist program (Chomsky 1992) views Tense as
checking Case (when it raises to AGRS), and AGR as checking agree-
ment. This is broadly what we are proposing here, with the difference
being that Tense need not raise to AGR to check Case; rather, Case-
checking can take place in SPEC/Tense P. The Belfast English exam-
ples then differ from the case in languages such as Arabic, where AGRS
is not strong, in that there the subject has nominative Case-marking and
raises to SPEC/AGRS at LF. In Belfast English, Case is already checked
before spell-out and therefore the subject does not raise further at LF.
Another difference from the approach outlined in Chomsky (1992)
relates to the relationship between AGRS and AGR0. Chomsky suggests
that the features of both AGR nodes must have identical values, so that
the NP features of AGR are either both weak or both strong. In English,
given this assumption, both must be weak, since otherwise the object
would have to raise before spell-out, giving the (ungrammatical) order
subject-object-verb. However, if our analysis of singular concord is cor-
rect, then the difference between Belfast English and standard English
is that, while in both the NP-feature of SPEC/Tense is strong, forcing
the subject to raise out of the VP, in Belfast English the NP feature of
AGRS is optionally weak, while in standard English it is strong. How-
ever, the fact that in both varieties the object fails to raise out of VP
(with certain exceptions: see Chapter 3) indicates that the strength of
features of AGRS and AGR0 is not necessarily identical.
Note that singular concord occurs both with verbs which raise in the
syntax and those which do not raise until LF; in the latter case, the sub-
ject raises to SPEC/Tense for checking in the syntax, but the verb does
not move until LF.
Thus, it seems that the -s ending which appears with singular concord
is pure Tense-marking. From this point of view, the -s ending is the
unmarked form in relation to agreement; in one sense, agreement can be
seen as removing the -s ending from forms other than the third person
singular. This goes some way to explaining the puzzle, pointed out by
Kayne (1989), of why in English the third person singular form, which
in other languages is often unmarked, is the one which has an overt
affix; in fact, the third person singular is the unmarked form, showing
only a tense inflection, with other forms being for agreement.
Notice also that our analysis, which has the subject in singular con-
SP, argues against the view that the
subject raises out of VP because agreement is obligatory in English
(Kitagawa 1986); in singular concord the subject raises out of VP oblig-
atorily even though it is not raising to SPEC/AGRSP and it is not trig-
gering agreement. It thus seems that what forces the subject to raise
must be the need to check Case; since in Belfast English Tense option-
ally checks Case, it need not raise further than SPEC/Tense.
Singular concord is available with do-support. Recent work suggests
that do-support is a language-particular rule which inserts do to bear
Tense and Agreement when LF verb raising is impossible and raising in
the syntax is also excluded (Chomsky 1989, 1992; Pollock 1989), as for
example with negative sentences containing verbs other than be, have,
and auxiliaries. Singular concord is possible with do-support, suggest-
ing that do may be inserted in Tense, and is not restricted to insertion in
the highest head of IP.
(81) The children doesn't do their piano practice too regular.

(82) Them oranges doesn't look too fresh.
Summarising the arguments in this section, then, we have proposed
that singular concord verbs are in fact completely unmarked for agree-
ment. They thus raise only as far as Tense. Their subjects raise to
SPEC/Tense P, a position in which default Case may be checked.
Pronouns and Singular Concord

We touched briefly in the previous section on the occurrence of singular
concord with pronoun subjects. Here, we look at this in more detail,
addressing in particular the question of why some personal pronouns,
those which are marked for nominative Case, do not occur with singular
concord.
(83) *They is going.

(84) *We takes the bus.
(85) *I reads the newspaper every Sunday.
An obvious solution to this question would be along the following
lines. Personal pronouns which bear overt Case must be marked either
nominative or objective/oblique. They must therefore check Case in
positions where nominative or accusative/oblique may be checked,
rather than positions where default Case may be checked; TenseP can-
not check nominative Case, and thus any nominative Case-marked item
will be excluded from this position.
However, there is a possible alternative to this which we should
explore; weak pronouns per se might not be able to have singular con-
cord because, for example, they were forced to move to SPEC/AGR
positions. Note that it is only pronouns which show Case in English,
and therefore the constraint excluding nominative Case-marked items
could be either a constraint on nominative Case-checking in the con-
struction, or a constraint on the appearance of pronouns in it: both
would have the same effect, since only pronouns show nominative
Case.
Before we can decide whether it is nominative Case-marked items
per se, or (weak) pronouns that are excluded from singular concord, we
need to look in more detail at exactly which pronouns cannot have sin-
gular concord; we also need to consider whether there are general con-
straints on pronoun positions which could account for the exclusion of
nominative Case-marked pronouns from occurring with singular con-
cord.
We noted above that NPs containing pronouns in their strong form
may occur with singular concord; thus pronouns which are part of a co-
ordination may have singular concord.
(86) Us and them's going.
(87) Him and me works in the city centre.
So may pronouns which are part of a larger NP
(88) Us students doesn't have much money.
(89) You(se) kids is supposed to go home.
Demonstrative pronouns may also have non-agreement.
(90) These makes no sense.
(91) Them's good for eating.
Note that here them is the distal demonstrative rather than the personal
pronoun; them does not act as a nominative pronoun.
(92) Them's no good, are they/*them?
(93) *John and Mary are good friends, aren't them?
Another subset of pronouns occurs with singular concord in Belfast

English. These are pronouns ending in -uns, usuns, yousuns, and
themuns, which are possible alternatives to the standard English set we,
you and they.
(94) a. Usuns is going.
b. Usuns are going.
(95) a. Yousuns is late.
b. Yousuns are late.
(96) a. Themuns is no good,
b. Themuns are no good.
These can be shown to be pronouns, rather than NPs containing a

pronoun like us guys, youse guys, them guys, because unlike the latter
they can occur in tag questions, and for the second occurrence of a ref-
erent. 1
(97) a. Themuns aren't going are themuns?
b. *Them guys aren't going are them guys?
(98) a. When themuns arrive I'll tell themuns.
b. *When them guys arrive I'll tell them guys.
That these personal pronouns occur with singular concord shows that
an analysis based on requiring elements which vary for person, for
example, to raise to SPEC/AGRS will not work. Noting that personal
pronouns require agreement in Welsh, whereas other NPs do not, Sadler
(1985) argues that this is because maximal feature-matching is required,
and thus elements specified for person trigger agreement obligatorily.
But as we see, it is not the case that all pronouns which are marked for
person trigger agreement; the -uns set does not.
Thus, it is only the set of pronouns /, you, she, he, it, we, youse, and
they which are forced to have agreement; all other pronouns may have
singular concord.
Before we examine what it is that forces these pronouns to raise to
SPEC/AGRSP, let us look at another construction where exactly the
same partitioning of pronouns occurs, the verb-particle construction. As
is well known, simple personal pronouns must occur between verb and
particle, whereas other NPs can occur either in this position or after the
particle.
(99) a. I phoned him up.
b. *I phoned up him.
(100) a. I phoned the owner up.
b. I phoned up the owner.
Note that the class of pronouns which may appear after the particle is
identical to the class which may have singular concord; thus co-ordi-
nates and other pronouns which are part of a larger NP, demonstratives,
and -uns pronouns in Belfast English do not have to occur between verb
and particle.
(101) My friend phoned up him and her.
(102) They helped out us students.
(103) The staff tore up those.
(104) They phoned up yousuns.
The verb-particle paradigm is indeed very similar to the agreement

one, in that we have a structure where there are two possible NP posi-
tions, but only the higher one is available for a subset of pronouns,
which is the same in both constructions. Thus, it is possible that we
have a related phenomenon.
What we would need, then, is an explanation for why a subset of pro-
nouns must raise to AGRS in Belfast English, and appear between the
verb and particle in verb-particle constructions in English in general,
whereas other pronouns and non-pronominal NPs may occur in another
position. The characteristic positioning of pronouns in the verb-particle
construction has been the subject of several studies, and various expla-
nations have been offered, a number of which we review below. None
of these precisely fits the apparently similar phenomenon of singular
concord in Belfast English.
Accounts of pronoun placement divide into two main types—those
which argue that the NP originates between verb and particle, and that
the alternative order is derived by movement of the NP to the post-parti-
cle position, a type of movement which they claim to be impossible for
pronouns; and those which argue that V Prt NP is the underlying order,
with the V NP Prt order derived by a movement rule, which is claimed
to be obligatory for pronouns.
Kayne (1984) is an example of the first type of approach. Kayne
argues that the NP is base-generated between the verb and the particle,
with the NP and particle forming a small clause construction; where the
NP appears after the particle at S-structure, this is the result of right-
ward movement, an operation normally reserved for "heavy" elements
and thus unavailable to weak pronouns. There are problems with the
analysis; as Johnson (1991) points out, the NP which occurs after the
particle here does not have to be as "heavy" as in other cases of heavy
NP shift.
(105) *John found unconvincing the explanation.

(106) John found out the explanation.
Moreover, as Gueron (1987) points out, elements which have under-

gone Heavy NP Shift are in general islands for extraction, but post-par-
ticle NPs are not.
(107) *What did you find unbelievable descriptions of?

(108) What did you look up descriptions of?
Whether or not these problems can be overcome, it is clear that sim-

ply from the point of view of word order we cannot see singular con-
cord as involving Heavy NP Shift; singular concord subjects do not
occur sentence-finally, but in the normal pre-verbal position.
Examples of the second type of analysis include Gueron's studies
(1987, 1990), which propose that the NP is in complement-position of
the PP at D-structure, that is, after the particle; the V-NP-Prt order is
derived by movement of the NP. This movement is claimed to be oblig-
atory for pronouns because these must be contiguous with a lexical
Case-assigner.
In relation to Belfast English, a problem arises in relation to contigu-
ity with a lexical Case-assigner; as we shall see in more detail in Chap-
ter 3, the subject in imperatives in Belfast English may appear after the
verb.
(109) Go you away.
(110) Believe you me.
The subject may intervene between the verb and object NP (including
pronouns) in the verb-particle construction
(111) Put you it away.

(112) Phone you them up.
This indicates that the verb does not have to be adjacent to the pronoun
at S-structure. We argue in the next chapter that these structures involve
the movement of the verb out of VP.
Moreover, we cannot require the subject to be adjacent to an overt
Case-assigner, or checker, at spell-out in either standard English or
Belfast English; for where the verb remains in the VP in the syntax, the
subject is clearly not adjacent to an overt Case-checker.
Koopman (1990) also has V-Prt-NP as the D-structure order, but
argues that the reason why pronouns must move in front of the particle
is that pronouns attract to SPEC positions—in this case to SPEC/PP;
note that if our analysis of singular concord is correct, then this cannot
be precisely the correct analysis, for in Belfast English the subject is in
a specifier position, SPEC/Tense, in the singular concord construction,
but this is not a possible position for the overtly case-marked set of pro-
nouns, which are forced to move to SPEC/AGRSP. We might amend
Koopman's analysis to require that pronouns attract to SPEC/Agree-
ment positions, but this would involve proposing that the position gov-
erned by a preposition in a Prepositional Phrase is a SPEC/Agreement
position, since these prepositions can occur there
(113) with him
(114) for them
Although some languages, for example Irish, do have prepositions

which show agreement, there do not seem to be clear arguments for
postulating an agreement phrase here in languages like English. More-
over, in those Belfast English imperative examples where the order is
verb-object-subject, we would have to postulate an extra AGR position
in addition to AGRS and AGR0 if both pronouns must be in specifier
positions.
(115) Read it quickly you to me.
(116) Show her always you your homework.
As we shall show in the next chapter the verb has raised to C in these
constructions, and the object has moved to SPEC/AGR
subject cannot therefore be in SPEC/AGRSP; it appears to be in
SPEC/VP, but that is not a SPEC/AGR position.
Thus, a number of proposals have been made about the distinctive
placing of pronouns in verb-particle constructions, but none of these
precisely fits the Belfast English data. What we would need is an expla-
nation for why a subset of pronouns must raise to AGRS, and appear
between the verb and particle in verb-particle constructions. Let us
begin by attempting to characterise the set of pronouns which must
raise to SPEC/AGRSP. The major difference between the elements
which must appear in the higher position and those which may also
appear in the lower position is that the former are for the most part
overtly Case-marked (or m-Case-marked, to borrow the term used by
Holmberg (1986) to distinguish morphological from abstract Case).
Thus demonstratives, the strong forms of pronouns which may occur in
coordinate structures, and -uns pronouns show no variation for Case;
whereas the personal pronouns which must appear in the higher posi-
tions are for the most part overtly Case-marked.
You, youse, and it are exceptions to the set, in that they do not have
overt Case-marking but nevertheless have to appear in the same posi-
tions as those which do; this suggests that, parallel to their paradigm set,
they require Case-marking which is in some sense overt but phonologi-
cally null. There is some evidence, however, that at least one member
of this set is changing to be a non-overtly Case-marked pronoun, and
that is Belfast English youse. For some speakers, this both permits sin-
gular concord and can occur after the particle in verb-particle construc-
tions.
(117) Youse is really stupid.
(118) I'll phone up youse.
As far as I can ascertain, these two possibilities are present or absent

together; that is, those for whom youse can occur with singular concord
can also place it after the particle, whereas those who reject sentences
like (117) also necessarily reject the singular concord cases like (118).
This is one area where the study of dialects is particularly useful; we
can determine which features are necessarily present or absent together.
It does not appear to be precisely overt Case-marking which deter-
mines the positioning of pronouns; as Vikner (1991) and Holmberg
(1992) point out, object shift, where the object moves out of VP, applies
in the Scandinavian languages in general to overtly Case-marked ele-
ments, but there are exceptions to this. All NPs in Faroese bear overt
Case, but only pronouns move. And strong pronouns do not object shift
in any of the Scandinavian languages, even though they may bear overt
Case. Holmberg (1992) suggests an analysis in which Case may be
strong or weak, the strong/weak distinction coinciding often but not
always with overt/covert Case-marking.
The fact that weak pronouns are those which disallow singular con-
cord, and also must occur between verb and particle in the verb-particle
construction, and can object shift, suggests that it may be worth explor-
ing the possibility that what prevents the occurrence of nominative Case
with a singular concord verb is in fact a requirement that a pronoun sub-
ject raise to SPEC/AGRSP rather than a prohibition on nominative Case
as such. Let us consider, however, how we might distinguish between
the two possibilities.
The key to establishing whether it is nominative Case per se, or pro-
nouns, which are excluded with non-agreeing verbs seems to lie in
instances where pronouns are co-ordinated. We noted earlier that where
pronouns are co-ordinated, or where a pronoun occurs in a co-ordinate
structure with a full NP, the pronoun may either have default Case
(identical to the accusative) or bear the Case assigned to the whole NP.
(119) He and I are going.

(120) Him and me are going.
(121) John and he go away up the road.
(122) John and him go away up the road.
We also noted that only where there was no nominative pronoun in the
construction could it occur with singular concord.
(123) *He and I is going.

(124) Him and me is going.
(125) *John and he goes away up the road.
(126) John and him goes away up the road.
Now, as we saw above there is evidence that "weak" pronouns attract
to certain positions. But these co-ordinated pronoun groups do not in
general act like weak pronouns. For example, weak pronouns cannot
normally occur in a right- or left-dislocated structure.
(127) *We're going up the road, we.

(128) We're going up the road, us.
(129) *We, we don't like coffee.
(130) Us, we don't like coffee.
However, conjoined nominative pronouns do occur in these struc-
tures:
(131) We're going up the road, John and I.

(132) We're going up the road, John and me.
(133) John and I, we don't like coffee.

(134) John and me, we don't like coffee.
Whatever excludes weak pronouns from these positions, it does not
exclude co-ordinated pronouns with nominative marking. Thus, co-
ordinated pronouns with nominative marking do not appear to pattern
with weak pronouns generally; therefore any constraint that excludes
weak pronouns from occurring in certain positions, including SPEC/TP
in the singular concord construction, will not automatically exclude
nominative-marked co-ordinated pronouns. This seems to suggest that
what is excluded in singular concord is not weak pronouns but nomina-
tive Case-marked elements.
We can show that there is no general requirement that co-ordinations
containing a nominative pronoun raise to SPEC/AGRS P before spell-
out by looking at pronouns in imperatives. As noted above, and dis-
cussed in some detail in the next chapter, imperative subjects can
remain in VP in the overt syntax in Belfast English; this means that they
are not in SPEC/AGRSP at S-structure. Now imperative subjects may
include a nominative co-ordinated pronoun:
(135) Be going you and he out of the door when they get here.
(136) Have been selected you and she for the team before the end of
term.
This shows that there is no absolute requirement that nominative Case-
marked pronouns are in SPEC/AGRSP at spell-out. What is excluded is
their appearance in SPEC/TP. This suggests that what is involved is not
a requirement that pronouns appear in a particular position (e.g., a
SPEC/AGR position) at S-structure, but rather a condition barring them
from appearing in SPEC/TenseP. Now, if appearance in SPEC/TenseP
involves checking of (non-nominative or default) Case, and excludes
further raising for Case-checking purposes, this will exclude the appear-
ance of nominative-marked items (including co-ordinates) from the sin-
gular concord structure, while allowing for such elements to occur out-
side SPEC/AGRSP at spell-out, and then raise to SPEC/AGRS at LF, in
certain circumstances. (For detailed discussion of imperatives, see the
following chapter).
Our analysis predicts that nominative pronouns should be excluded
from appearing in any construction where they are not in, and cannot
get by LF into, SPEC/AGRS, but rather must check Case elsewhere.
This type of circumstance appears to arise in a dialect of English
studied by Kimball and Aissen (1971) and Kayne (1989). In this dialect
the verb may agree with a wh-element rather than with the subject.
(137) The people who Clark think are in the garden
According to Kayne's analysis, these examples involve the move-

ment of an abstract AGR to C; the subject NP cannot therefore be Case-
marked under agreement with AGR, but must get Case in some other
way. Kayne notes that this construction is impossible where the subject
is a nominative pronoun.
(138) *the people who she think are in the garden
(139) *the person whose cars he think are beautiful
Here we have a case where full NPs may lack agreement with the
,yerb, but nominative Case-marked pronouns have obligatory agree-
ment; in our terms, nominative pronouns must check Case in SPEC/
AGRSP, but full NPs, which are not overtly Case-marked, may check
Case in some other way.
Similar considerations apply to sentences in Belfast English and (col-
loquial) standard English where the subject appears to agree with
adjunct wh-words rather than the subject. As noted by Radzinski
(1985), sentences like the following may have singular verbs.
(140) Where's my glasses?
(141) How's the children?
Lack of agreement is available in non-inverted structures only in

dialects which generally admit singular concord.
(142) BE/*SE I wonder where my glasses is.
It seems that in structures like (140) and (141) the verb is agreeing
with the wh-element; if this is again a case of agreement between the
wh-element and AGRS (which has moved to C), then the subject cannot
check Case in SPEC/AGRSP. Again, as we would predict, nominative
Case-marked pronouns are impossible here.
(143) a. *Where's they?
b. Where are they?
(144) a. *How's we doing?
b. How are we doing?
As with other alternations of this type, it is only nominative pronouns
which are required to be in the canonical Case-checking position.
(145) Where's themuns?

(146) How's these?
(147) How's her and them getting on together?
Thus, the requirement that overtly nominative-marked elements

check Case in SPEC/AGRSP appears to manifest itself in constructions
other than singular concord, and in varieties other than Belfast English.
Returning to singular concord in Belfast English, let us summarise
our findings in relation to pronouns. We argued that it was not pronomi-
nal status per se, but rather overt nominative Case-marking, which
excluded weak pronouns from occurring with non-agreeing verbs.
Nominative Case-marked elements must check Case in SPEC/AGRSP,
either in the syntax or at LF; they cannot, unlike items which have
default Case, check Case in SPEC/TP, and thus cannot occur with sin-
gular concord verbs.
Inversion and Singular Concord
Apart from the structures involving adjunct wh-words discussed in the

previous section, singular concord is generally impossible in structures
showing inversion.
(148) *Is the children tired?
(149) *What is the students doing?
(150) *Has the girls left?
(151) *What has their friends decided?
The impossibility of inversion in questions does not automatically

follow from anything we have said so far. Movement of the verb to C is
forced in English questions, presumably by the presence of a [+wh] C
which has to be checked by the movement of the verb to it (see Rizzi
1991). The presence of this [+wh] marker should force the movement
of the verb from Tense to C via AGRS, even though the verb does not
otherwise need to move to AGRS for the purposes of agreement check-
ing. However, in fact, such movement is impossible; only agreeing
verbs can move to C.
Note that in order to get to C, a verb will have to pass through AGRS,
since under the Head Movement Constraint (possibly subsumed under
the "shortest movement" requirement of Chomsky [1992J), a head can
only move to the next head up. Therefore, a verb could not move
directly from Tense to C. Now this means that there will be a verb-trace
in AGRS, and this presumably will, at least at LF, trigger movement of

the subject to SPEC/AGRS. The passage of the verb through AGRS must
be available only for verbs which are marked for agreement. This sug-
gests that the presence of an element in a higher head (C) which must
be checked in the syntax is insufficient to trigger raising; triggering
must be done for movement at each stage. The verb may not move from
Tense to AGRS unless the V-feature of AGRS is strong, even if there is a
higher head which requires to be checked; Head movement is therefore
strictly local in that it must be forced at each stage.
That this is the correct approach seems to be shown by the do-support
requirement in questions. In general, main verbs do not raise in English,
remaining rather in VP, presumably because the V-feature of Tense is
weak. The requirement to have a verb in C where C is [+wh] is not in
itself sufficient to trigger verb movement through I to C in the syntax.
Rather, do-support must be used, which, as we have noted, involves the
insertion of the verb do under Tense.
(152) a. *Went they home?
b. Did they go home?
(153) a. * Ate the children the sweets?
b. Did the children eat the sweets?
Do-insertion cannot of course occur under AGRS or C to rescue sin-

gular concord sentences, since as we have shown above do is inserted
under Tense, and Tense is already filled by the singular concord verb
(or is a required checking position for the singular concord verb at LF).
(154) *Do the girls likes coffee?
(155) *Do the students is happy?
Thus, inversion cannot occur with singular concord verbs because

they are not in AGRS, and do-insertion is also impossible because Tense
is filled by the verb; inversion is therefore excluded, and sentences
requiring inversion must use agreeing verbs which can move to AGRS
on their way to C.
Conclusion
We have argued that singular concord in Belfast English is actually lack

of agreement marking. Being unmarked for agreement, singular con-
cord verbs do not move to AGRS, but rather remain in Tense. The sub-
ject raises only as high as SPEC/Tense, where its Case can be checked.
However, nominative Case cannot be checked by Tense, and therefore
nominative Case-marked items cannot occur in this construction, but
must rather move to SPEC/AGRS.
The availability of SPEC/Tense as a subject position has two notable
effects in the grammar; it permits the occurrence of negative polarity
items in subject position, and the raising of objects where the verb
moves out of VP.
The impossibility of singular concord verbs moving to C shows that
head movement must be forced at each stage; a head cannot make an
unforced move to an intermediate projection just because that move is a
step which is necessary in order to check a higher projection.
3
Overt-Subject Imperatives
In both Belfast English and standard English, imperatives may occur

with or without overt subjects. Subjectless imperatives appear to be
identical in both varieties, so that (1), for example, is grammatical in
both.
(1) SE/BEGoaway.
However, there is an important difference in relation to the position of
overt subjects in imperatives. In standard English, the subject must pre-
cede the verb, as in (2a) and (3a), just as it must in indicative sentences.
However, in Belfast English an alternative order is possible, with the
verb and subject inverted, as in (2b) and (3b); this inversion is ungram-
matical in standard English.
(2) a. SE/BE You go away.
b. BE/*SE Go you away.
(3) a. SE/BE You read that.
b. BE/*SE Read you that.
If the subject originates in the SPEC/VP position as suggested in
most versions of the VP-internal subject hypothesis, then it appears that
the verb has raised out of VP in the Belfast English inverted impera-
tives. This is surprising because in general, main verbs cannot raise in
English. As noted by Pollock (1989), English differs from a language
like French in that verbs (other than be, have, and auxiliaries), do not
raise out of VP, so that they appear after negation and adverbs which
occur to the left of VP, and do not raise to C in questions.
45
(4) a. Jean n'aime pas Marie.

b. *Jean not likes Marie.
c. Jean does not like Marie.
(5) a. Jean embrasse souvent Marie.
b. *Jean kisses often Marie.
(6) a. Jean often kisses Mary.
b. *Jean souvent embrasse Marie.
(7) a. Aime-t'il Marie?

b. *Loves he Marie
c. Does he love Marie?
Chomsky (1992), following the spirit of Pollock's analysis, but rein-

terpreting it within the Minimalist framework, argues that in English the
V-feature of Tense is weak, and therefore does not need to be checked
before spell-out; so that, since rules apply as late as possible, English
verbs do not raise in the syntax. Now, in relation to verb placement in
questions and negatives, Belfast English behaves exactly like standard
English. Main verbs cannot raise above negation and adverbs, and they
do not invert with the subject in questions.
(8) *SE/*BE He went not away.
(9) *SE/*BE You read not that.
(10) *SE/*BE He went always away.

(11) *SE/*BE He read often that.
(12) *SE/*BE Went he away?
(13) *SE/*BE Read you that?
Both varieties require do-support in negatives and questions.

(14) SE/BE He did not go away.
(15) SE/BE You did not read that.
(16) SE/BE Did he go away?
(17) SE/BE Did you read that?
Thus, it is not the case that inversion in imperatives derives from a

more general availability of verb raising in Belfast English. The only
other difference in relation to inversion between the two varieties is that
Belfast English allows inversion in embedded questions, a topic which
will be examined in detail in Chapter 5; but given that imperatives are a
wholly root phenomenon, it does not seem likely that there is any very
Overt-Subject Imperatives 47
direct link between the two. Moreover, in embedded questions, just as

in direct ones, main verbs cannot raise, but they appear to be able to do
so in imperatives.
The question arises then as to why verbs can raise in imperatives in
Belfast English, but not standard English; why such raising is restricted
to imperatives; and where the verb and subject are in the inverted struc-
ture. Moreover, Belfast imperatives show other interesting characteris-
tics; in particular, as noted briefly in the previous chapter where the
object is a weak pronoun, it may appear between the verb and the sub-
ject, or after the subject.
(18) Read it you to me.
(19) Read you it to me.
And where an auxiliary is present, the subject may sometimes occur

after the lexical verb rather than after the auxiliary.
(20) Be going you out to school when I get back.
Both of these facts make an analysis where the verb raises to C and
the subject to SPEC/AGR,, exactly as in questions but with a wider
range of verbs, less than straightforward: if this were the case, we
would not expect to find an object between the verb and the subject, and
we would always expect to find the subject after the auxiliary rather
than the lexical verb.
Before we consider what is happening in these imperatives, however,
we need to look at the facts in more detail, for Belfast English impera-
tives have not previously been discussed in the literature, and even stan-
dard English imperatives have not been extensively considered. We
thus proceed to outline the characteristics of overt-subject imperatives
in standard English and Belfast English, before going on to analyse
these in more detail.
The Overt-Subject Imperative in Standard English

In standard English, imperatives exhibit either an empty subject or a
lexical subject in preverbal position; both of these possibilities also
exist in Belfast English, in addition to the inverted pattern.
(21) a. Go away.
b. You go away.
(22) a. Stay here.

b. You stay here.
(23) a. Read that.
b. You read that.
Where an overt subject is used, it is most often you, but a small number
of other subjects are permitted, for example everyone, somebody, all of
you (Beukema & Coopmans 1989).
(24) Everyone put on their coats.
(25) Somebody tell me the answer.
(26) All of you keep quiet.
Vocatives often occur with imperatives, as in (27) and (28), charac-
terised by an intonation break between the vocative and the rest of the
imperative.
(27) a. John, put on your coat.
b. Put on your coat, John.
(28) a. You, tell me the answer.
b. Tell me the answer, you.
It might be thought that apparent imperative subjects are really voca-

tives. However, Beukema and Coopmans (1989) demonstrate that there
exist true imperative subjects which are not simply vocatives. Thus
indefinites such as somebody can occur as an imperative subject, but
cannot occur as a vocative.
(29) Somebody open the window.
(30) *Somebody, open the window.
Moreover, there is a contrast between vocatives and true imperative
subjects in relation to the interpretation of possessive pronouns:
(31) Everybody take out their books.
(32) Everybody, take out their books.
In the vocative example, the pronoun their cannot be co-referential with
everybody. Rather, the sentence must be understood as having an empty
you subject, which cannot of course be co-referential with their. By
contrast in the example where everybody is in subject position, their can
have a bound reading, where each person is to take out their own books.
Apparently, a null subject in imperatives must be interpreted as second
person singular, and in vocatives, this null element occurs in the true
subject position; being second person, it cannot be co-referential with a
third-person element. Similar considerations apply to reflexives. Where
there is a vocative third-person NP, a third-person reflexive is ungram-
matical; on the other hand, where a third-person NP is in subject posi-
tion, a third-person reflexive is possible.
(33) *Everybody, wash themselves.
(34) Everybody wash themselves.
Thus, it is clear that imperatives with true subjects are possible. And
as noted above, in standard English these always occur before the verb.
Negative imperatives have a number of interesting characteristics.
They always require do-support
(35) Don't do that.
(36) Don't go away.
Here, an overt subject, if present, occurs after don't
(37) Don't you do that.

(38) Don't you go away.
As we noted above, don't is required even with verbs which normally
in English do not require do-support, for example, be and have
(39) a. *Be not silly.
b. Don't be silly.
(40) a. *Have not a cigarette.
b. Don't have a cigarette.
Compare the non-imperative forms, where be and have can raise over
the negative; indeed for be, such raising is obligatory and do-support is
not available.
(41) a. They are not silly.
b. *They don't be silly.
(42) a. They haven't a cigarette.
b. They don't have a cigarette.
Thus generally in English, Jo-support is not found with be in the nega-
tive, and is optional with have; but in imperatives, even these verbs
form the negative imperative with don't.
Note that where the imperative has an overt subject, the negative
must be the contracted form don't, and not the uncontracted do not
(43) a. Don't you speak to me like that.
b. *Do you not speak to me like that.
c. *Do not you speak to me like that.
Imperatives with the uncontracted form do not are impossible where

there is an overt subject.In this, negative imperatives with overt subjects
differ from questions, where both do and do not are available.
(44) a. Don't you like coffee?
b. Do you not like coffee?
(Of course, not cannot undergo subject-auxiliary inversion unless it

contracts to the auxiliary, so that a sentence like (45) is impossible.)
(45) Do not you like coffee?
Emphatic imperatives can be formed with do, if there is a null sub-

ject; however, overt subjects cannot occur with emphatic do.
(46) a. Do read that.
b. *Do you read that.
c. *You do read that.
(c) is of course only ungrammatical as an imperative: it is grammatical

as an indicative.
Belfast English Imperatives

There are in fact two "subdialects" of Belfast English in relation to
imperatives. In one, inversion is restricted to a subset of intransitive
verbs; in the other, it is available with all verbs. We begin with some
observations which apply to both varieties, before going on to look in
detail at each variety individually.
As noted above, Belfast English posesses not only the standard Eng-
lish imperative strategies but also an alternative strategy, involving a
postverbal subject: as with standard English, the overt subject is most
frequently second person: you, or its plurals youse and yousuns, but
again it can be one of a limited range of other items:
(47) a. Go you away.
b. Go everybody away.
(48) a. Run youse to the telephone.

b. Run somebody to the teleph e.
The effect of including the subject is roughly the same as that of includ-
ing a preverbal subject in standard English imperatives; it has a slightly
emphatic or contrastive effect. And as in standard English, where the
subject is you, it has to be in its full stressed form rather than a reduced
form.
(49) a. Go [ju:] away,

b. *Go [JQ] away.
(50) a. [ju:] go away.
b. *[je] go away.
In this it differs from you in both declarative subject position and in
object position.
(51) [ju:/je] can go away.
(52) I'll help [ju:/je].
Similar considerations apply to the plural youse; in declaratives this
may generally be [ju:z] or [j;ez], but in imperative subject position it
must be [ju:z].
(53) a. Run [ju:z] on.
b. *Run [jez] on.
(54) a. [ju:z/jez] are having me on.
b. I was coming to tell [ju:z/jez].
As noted above, inversion of full verbs and subjects occurs only in
imperatives. As in standard English, full verbs cannot invert with sub-
jects in questions, but must have do-support; the availability of inver-
sion in imperatives does not derive, then, from a general availability of
inversion with main verbs in Belfast English, but is, rather, restricted to
the imperative construction.
Nor can such verbs raise to I (=AGRS); as in standard English this is
ungrammatical with verbs other than be and have, as shown by the fact
that full verbs cannot raise above negation or adverbs.
(55) *I found not that book.

(56) *They read quickly the chapter.
All we have discussed so far relates to both subdialects of impera-
tives; however, we now need to consider each of the subdialects sepa-

rately. We will label them dialects A and B.
Dialect A
Speakers of dialect A have a more restricted use of inversion than those
who speak dialect B; whereas dialect B speakers permit inversion with
any verb, in dialect A, inversion is only possible with a restricted range
of verbs. The verbs which permit inversion in this dialect are all intran-
sitive.
(57) Go you there.
is grammatical but
(58) *Read you that book.
with a transitive verb is not. Not all intransitive verbs permit inversion,
however, but only a subset of these. All of the verbs which permit
inversion in dialect A are verbs of motion; other verbs never permit
inversion in this dialect.
(59) *Eat you up.
(60) * Always laugh you at his jokes.
Not all motion verbs/verb phrases permit inversion, but only a subset of
these. It is at first sight difficult to characterise exactly which verbs per-
mit inversion, particularly as the same verb may or may not permit
inversion depending on the content of the remainder of the verb phrase.
For example, consider the verb run. In dialect A, this verb does not nor-
mally allow imperative inversion when it is the sole constituent of the
verb phrase.
(61) *Run you.
But it does allow inversion where it is followed by a particle such as
away, or an indication of destination.
(62) Run you away.
(63) Run you home.
(64) Run you into the garden.
It might seem that the generalisation is that, for some reason, at least
one constituent must appear after the subject. But in fact the presence of
a constituent after the verb is not in itself sufficient to enable inversion.

Thus inversion is ungrammatical in the following examples.
(65) *Run you in the garden.
(66) *Run you every day if you want to keep fit.
It seems that the type of constituent which follows the verb is signifi-
cant.
These facts are not exclusive to run; a similar pattern emerges with
most other motion verbs. However, there are a few verbs which allow
inversion regardless of the content of the verb phrase, for example,
arrive and leave
(67) Leave you now.
(68) *Run you now.
(69) Arrive you before 6 o'clock.
(70) *Run you before 6 o'clock.
The verbs or verb phrases which allow inversion have a semantic char-
acteristic in common. They all involve actions that have an end-point,
that is, they are telic (for a discussion of telicity, see van Hout et al.,
(1993).
This telicity need not be inherent in the verb, but it must be a charac-
teristic of the verb phrase of which it is part. This is why the presence of
an indication of destination, or of a particle which indicates that the
action has an end-point, is significant; these elements make the verb
phrase telic. Consider the following examples with the verb walk.
Those which are [+TELIC] allow inversion, whereas those which are
[-TELIC] do not.
(71) Walk you out of the door.
(72) Walk you into the garden.
(73) Walk you away.
(74) Walk you home.
(75) *Walkyou.
(76) *Walk you in the garden.
(77) *Walk you every day if you want to keep fit.
Telicity is the characteristic which determines unaccusativity in some
languages, for example Dutch (van Hout et al. 1993), and this suggests
that the class of verbs which takes imperative inversion in dialect A is
the unaccusative class.
A further argument for this is the fact that precisely those verb
phrases which allow imperative inversion also allow inversion of the
following type, generally considered to be a characteristic of unac-
cusatives (on unaccusatives, see Burzio (1986), Levin & Rappaport
Hovav 1992, Rappaport Hovav & Levin 1992), and the discussion on
the analysis of dialect A imperatives below).
(78) Out of the door ran a mouse.

(79) *In the house ran a mouse.
(80) Run you out of the door.
(81) *Run you in the house.
(82) Into the garden walked two men.
(83) *In the garden walked two men.
(84) Walk you into the garden.
(85) *Walk you in the garden.
Many of the telic verbs are particle verbs in English—e.g., go away, sit
down, run off—so that very many inverted structures involve such
verbs.
(86) Go everybody away.

(87) Sit youse down.
(88) Run you off to school.
In inverted imperatives in dialect A, the subject always occurs imme-
diately following the verb. Adverbs cannot intervene between the verb
and the subject
(89) a. *Go always you to school.

b. Always go you to school.
(90) a. *Run quickly you away.
b. Run you away quickly.
In dialect A, where the imperative contains an auxiliary, the subject

you occurs, not after the auxiliary, but after the main verb. Affirmative
imperatives with auxiliaries are fairly marginal, in both standard Eng-
lish and Belfast English, but for speakers of dialect A, sentences like
(91a) and (92a) are very much better than (91b) and (92b), which are,
for them, wholly ungrammatical.
(91) a. Be going you out of the door when he arrives.
b. *Be you going out of the door when he arrives.
(92) a. Be leaving you by six o'clock.

b. *Be you leaving by six o'clock.
Passive imperatives with inversion are also possible in this dialect;

for pragmatic reasons, passive imperatives are rather odd, but where
they can occur they again show the pattern of the subject occurring after
the lexical verb.
(93) a. Be elected you president before the end of the year.
b. *Be you elected president before the end of the year.
Negative imperatives in this dialect are formed, as in all the dialects,
with a sentence-initial don't, and they may be inverted, with the verb
preceding the subject.
(94) Don't go you away.
(95) Don't walk you home by yourself.
In dialect A, then, imperative inversion occurs with a subset of verbs

which share particular characteristics; they are verbs of motion, and
telicity must be a property of the verb or verb phrase. Apart from sen-
tences containing such verb phrases, inversion only occurs in passive
imperatives.
Dialect B
In dialect B, inversion is possible with all verbs; it is not restricted to
the subset of verbs of motion which permit inversion in dialect A.
(96) Read you that book.
(97) Do you your best.
In this dialect, as in both dialect A and standard English, negatives

are formed with a sentence-initial don't. We noted that in dialect A, the
subject in negative imperatives can occur after the verb; this is also pos-
sible in dialect B, but not with all verbs; only those verbs which permit
inversion in dialect A allow the subject to occur after the verb in nega-
tives in dialect B; with other verbs, the subject must occur between
don't and the verb in negatives.
(98) a. Don't run you away.
b. Don't you run away
(99) a. Don't go everybody home.
b. Don't everybody go home
(100) a. *Don't hit you your sister.

b. Don't you hit your sister.
(101) a. *Don't give anyone the secret away.
b. Don't anyone give the secret away.
Where there is an auxiliary present, the subject generally occurs after
the auxiliary and before the lexical verb.
(102) a. Be you practising your piano-playing when I get back.

b. *Be practising you your piano-playing when I get back.
However, with the subset of verbs which allow inversion in dialect
A, the subject may occur either after the auxiliary or after the main
verb.
(103) a. Be you walking into the room just as she is leaving.

b. Be walking you into the room just as he is leaving.
This is one case where it is particularly important to get grammaticality
judgements from speakers who themselves use the dialect concerned.
Dialect A speakers, or Belfast speakers who do not themselves use
imperative inversion but have some intuitions about it through hearing
others using it, often appear to have formed incorrect hypotheses about
the grammars of dialect B speakers.
Thus speakers who do not themselves permit inversion, sometimes
indicate that they think that sentences such as the following are used by
dialect B speakers.
(104) a. Be helping you your mother when I get back.

b. Don't forget you your homework.
whereas, in fact, for dialect B speakers themselves, such sentences are
impossible, and I have not recorded any examples of sentences where
the subject follows a transitive verb which appears after a negative or an
auxiliary. It is not perhaps surprising that examples of the latter are
lacking, since the use of auxiliaries such as be in imperatives in English
is fairly marginal, but negative imperatives are rather frequent, and one
would certainly have expected to find examples of inversion with tran-
sitive verbs in negative imperatives if this was in fact grammatical. The
speakers of other dialects appear to have come up with some judgement
on what dialect B speakers do, along the lines of "the subject always
comes after the lexical verb," without actually being able to reflect
accurately the grammaticality judgements of actual speakers of this

dialect. If one wants to study the limits of possible internal grammars,
then such judgements could be highly misleading.
We move on now to look at the position of the verb and subject in
relation to adverbs. Where there is a sentential adverb, it generally
occurs after the subject, as in (105), but is also possible after the verb
but before the subject, as in (106).
(105) Remember you always your homework.

(106) Remember always you your homework.
With VP adverbials, the preferred position is VP-final (as generally

in Belfast English), but these can occur before the verb; if so, the pre-
ferred position is after the subject, but they can occur between the verb
and subject.
(107) Write you carefully that letter.

(108) Write carefully you that letter.
The positioning of weak object pronouns in imperatives is noteworthy.

In general in both Belfast English and standard English, these appear in
the normal object position after the verb where non-pronominal NPs
also occur.
(109) a. I read the book.

b. I read it.
(110) a. Mary saw her friends.
b. Mary saw them.
However, in Belfast English imperatives, weak object pronouns dif-

fer from full NPs in that they may occur before the subject, whereas full
NPs may only appear after the subject.
Thus, a weak object pronoun may precede or follow the subject, as in
the following.
(111) a. Give it you to the teacher.

b. Give you it to the teacher.
(112) a. Hand me you that parcel.
b. Hand you me that parcel.
The pre-subject position is not available for non-pronominal NPs.
(113) a. *Give the book you to the teacher.

b. Give you the book to the teacher.
(114) a. *Hand the postman you that parcel.
b. Hand you the postman that parcel.
We noted that a weak object pronoun may either precede or follow

the subject. In relation to sentential adverbs, however, the position of a
weak object pronoun is fixed; it must precede such adverbs.
(115) a. Make you them always a cup of tea.
b. *Make you always them a cup of tea.
c. Make them always you a cup of tea.
However, where the object is a full NP, it must occur after the
adverb.
(116) a. *Make you your mummy always a cup of tea.
b. Make you always your mummy a cup of tea.
Stressed pronouns, co-ordinated pronouns, and the "-uns" pronouns dis-

cussed in the previous chapter behave like full NPs; they occur after the
subject and after adverbs.
(117) a. Tell you HIM the truth.
b. *TelI HIM you the truth.
(118) a. Tell you him and her the truth.
b. *Tell him and her you the truth.
(119) a. Tell you themuns the truth.
b. *Tell themuns you the truth.
Thus, whatever is responsible for the particular placing of weak object

pronouns singles out the same class of items as do other processes
(object shift in the Scandinavian languages; pronoun placement in verb-
particle constructions in English) where, as here, certain pronouns
behave like full NPs.
There exists in Belfast English a verb which can only be used in
imperatives, and that is away; it is possible only in dialect B.
(120) Away you and tell them.
(121) Away you home.
This verb has approximately the meaning of go. It cannot occur as a
verb unless it is imperative.
(122) *They away to school every day.

(123) *If you away home every day at four o'clock, you'll never get your
work finished.
Unlike other verbs, with which inversion is optional, where this verb
occurs with an overt subject it must precede the subject; inversion is
obligatory.
(124) a. Away you on.
b. *You away on.
(125) a. *Away youse ouside.
b. Youse away outside.
(126) a. Away you children to your beds.
b. *You children away to your beds.
In addition, unlike other verbs which cannot inflect (such as come, go

preceding a verb: Jaeggli & Hyams 1993), away does not occur in other
contexts which do not have overt inflection.
(127) *She asked them to away on.
(128) *I told the children to away to their beds.
(129) *I away home after work.
Compare:
(130) She asked them to come see her.
(131) I told the children to go ask him.
(132) I go see my tutor every week.
Thus it is not simply the case that the verb away occurs in uninflected
contexts; rather, it is entirely restricted to occurring in imperatives.
Away cannot occur with a negative.
(133) *Don't away you to bed.

(134) *Don't away everybody to school.
Summarising, in dialect B inversion is available in positive impera-

tives with all verbs; in negative imperatives it is restricted to those verbs
which allow inversion in dialect A, that is, a subclass of motion verbs.
Weak object pronouns differ from other NPs in that they must precede
adverbs, and may precede the subject, in inverted imperatives. Finally,
although inversion is generally optional, it is obligatory with one verb,
away, which is only used in imperatives.
The Structure of Belfast English Inverted Imperatives

The Structure of Dialect A Imperatives
We begin by considering the grammar of speakers of dialect A. In this
dialect, as noted above, inversion is restricted to a subclass of motion
verbs/verb phrases which can be characterised semantically as [+telic].
Let us begin by considering the position of the verb in these structures,
in particular, whether inversion has arisen through the raising of the
verb out of VP to a position in front of the subject.
An accepted diagnostic for raising out of VP is the position of the
verb in relation to negation and adverbs (see Pollock 1989, Vikner
1991). Assuming that both negatives and adverbs are situated to the left
of VP, then occurrence of a verb to the left of these is an indication that
it must have moved out of VP. In overt-subject imperatives, negation is
not, as we will see below, a very good indicator of verb location, since,
it will be argued, the negator don't is not in NEG but in C. However,
adverbs can still provide an indication of whether the verb has moved
outofVP.
In dialect A, the verb in these imperatives always follows sentential
adverbs.
(135) a. Always come you here when I call you.
b. *Come always you here when I call you.
c. *Come you always here when I call you.
VP adverbs preferentially occur VP-finally in Belfast English; how-

ever, these adverbs can occur VP-initially, and this order is possible in
imperatives.
(136) Quickly run you home.
What is entirely ungrammatical for speakers of this dialect is for an
adverb to intervene between the verb and subject.
(137) *Run quickly you home.
Assuming that at least VP adverbs are left-adjoined to VP, then it
appears that for speakers of this dialect, the verb cannot move out of
VP. The verb-subject order must arise for another reason.
As we saw above, in this dialect, only telic motion verbs can have
subject-verb inversion; this class of verbs is often considered to be
unaccusative; in languages which use be to mark the perfect with unac-
cusatives and have with other verbs—for example, French, German,

Dutch—this class of verbs takes be. (The class of verbs which takes be
is wider than this in some cases; for example in German, verbs which
involve movement over space but are not necessarily telic take be).
Now it is widely assumed that unaccusative verbs have subjects which
are actually underlying objects, so that the underlying structure of
(138) He goes to school.
would be
(139) Goes he to school.
with the underlying object raising into subject position before spell-out.
We also noted that the class of verbs which allowed inversion in Belfast
English was exactly that class which allowed postverbal subjects with
PP-topicalisation, another indication of unaccusativity.
Now under the Minimalist program, precisely the way in which lan-
guages may differ from one another is in whether movement occurs
before or after spell-out. It would not therefore be unexpected to find
that there are languages where the NP in unaccusatives is not raised into
subject position before spell-out, and that is precisely what is proposed
here. In Belfast English imperatives, it is suggested, the subject remains
in situ in VP; in other words, it is not forced to raise before spell-out to
SPEC/AGRSP.
If our approach is correct, it has implications for the underlying syn-
tactic structure of unaccusatives. Although early approaches to unac-
cusatives (e.g., Burzio 1986) assumed that in unaccusatives the subject
originated in D-structure object position in the syntax and moved to the
subject position, some recent approaches (for example, Jackendoff
1990) have suggested that, while the subject is the theme semantically,
it is in subject position throughout the syntax, being placed there by
linking rules which determine the relationship between lexical concep-
tual structure and the syntax, placing the highest argument in subject
position. In Jackendoff's approach, there is no stage in the syntax at
which the subject is in postverbal position. On the contrary, it seems
from the Belfast English data that the argument in unaccusatives can be
in the object position in the syntax.
If the subject does not have to raise out of VP in dialect A impera-
tives, then we would expect to be able to see evidence of inversion in
other structures where the surface subject is an object in underlying
structure, in addition to unaccusatives. The obvious example of such a

structure is the passive, where a sentence like:
(140) The dog was found.
is generally assumed to derive from a structure like:
(141) was found the dog
the surface subject being the thematic object. If our analysis is correct,
then we would expect to be able to have postverbal subjects in passive
imperatives. And, as noted above, inversion is possible in passive
imperatives in Belfast English.
We also noted above that in dialect A the subject always occurs, as
we would predict, directly after the lexical verb. It is not possible in
dialect A for it to occur after an auxiliary, although this is possible in
dialect B.
Thus, it seems to be the case that apparent inversion in dialect A
imperatives in fact arises from lack of raising of the subject out of its
base position.
Now it may seem strange that in one particular construction, the sub-
ject does not raise; for, in general, subject-raising is obligatory in
Belfast English, just as in standard English.
(142) *Went heout of the room.
(143) * Sat they down.
What determines raising of the subject in the overt syntax is the
strength or weakness of the NP-features of the node to which raising
takes place. We noted in the previous chapter that the NP feature of
AGRS can be weak in Belfast English; raising as far as SPEC/AGRS is
not always required. But it was argued that the NP-feature of Tense was
strong, forcing the subject to move out of the VP into SPEC/Tense. It
seems plausible that in imperatives, the NP-feature of Tense can also be
weak, and thus the subject NP remains in VP. There is indeed some evi-
dence that Tense is not instantiated in imperatives. They have no tense
marking, and, unlike infinitives, which have to, nothing overt filling the
Tense node. Moreover, in imperatives with lexical subjects, it is impos-
sible to have do as an auxiliary, and we argued in the previous chapter
that do is inserted under Tense.
(144) *Do you come in.
(145) *Do you not hit them.
The optionality of raising in imperatives would follow naturally if

Tense is not instantiated in imperatives and if, as we argued in the pre-
vious chapter, the subject is not required to move to SPEC/AGRSP;
there would thus be nothing to force the subject to raise out of VP.
In dialect A, then, subjects do not have to raise in the overt syntax;
because some subjects originate after the verb, the lack of raising results
in apparent inversion of the subject and the verb, although in fact nei-
ther has moved.
Notice that there nothing to assign Case to the subject in these imper-
atives. In unaccusatives, the verb does not assign accusative Case, and
the underlying object is thus, in the general case, forced to move to sub-
ject position. Similarly, in passives Case is not assigned to the underly-
ing object, so that it is forced to move into the surface subject position.
Thus, in a framework incorporating a Case-filter operating on the output
of S-structure, such imperatives should be excluded, since the Case-fil-
ter blocks NPs which are not either themselves Case-marked or part of a
Case-marked chain. The fact such NPs are possible here is an argument
in favour of Case-checking by LF (as in the Minimalist program of
Chomsky, 1992) rather than a Case filter operating at S-structure level.
At LF, these subjects will move to SPEC/AGRSP and have their Case
checked there.
The difference between standard English and dialect A of Belfast
English, then, is that in the latter the subject need not raise out of VP in
imperatives. We have suggested that this follows naturally from the fact
that the NP-feature of AGRS is optionally weak in Belfast English, as
proposed in the previous chapter, and that Tense is not instantiated in
imperatives.
The Structure of Dialect B Imperatives

As noted above, imperative inversion in dialect B is possible with all
verbs; it is not restricted to unaccusatives. Therefore, it cannot simply
be the case that the subject and verb remain in situ. Either we must have
here postverbal subjects of the type commonly found in pro-drop lan-
guages, or the verb must raise out of VP, with the subject either remain-
ing in situ or raising to a projection below that to which the verb raises.
We begin by considering the first of these possibilities.
In many pro-drop languages, the subject may occur postverbally,
adjoined to VP, as in the following examples from Italian.
(146) pro ha telefonato Gianni.

(147) pro mangia le mele Gianni.
A possible analysis of postverbal subjects in dialect B imperatives

would see them as similar to postverbal subjects in the pro-drop lan-
guages. Although both Belfast English and standard English are non-
pro-drop in general, requiring overt subjects, imperatives can have null
subjects in both varieties.
(148) Go away.
(149) Read that book.
It would thus not be surprising to find that one of the varieties permit-
ted postverbal subjects. Pro-drop languages also appear to differ among
themselves in this way, with many pro-drop languages, for example
Italian (Rizzi 1982,1986), allowing postverbal subjects, whereas others
such as Brazilian Portuguese do not (Chao 1980). A rather neat analysis
could be provided by arguing that some characteristic of imperatives
(perhaps a strong AGR, necessarily marked as second person singular)
allowed them to be pro-drop, and that while Belfast English fell into
that group of pro-drop languages which permits postverbal subjects,
Standard English fell into the Portuguese-type group, which does not
permit these.
Unfortunately, however, the subject positions available in Belfast
English imperatives differ from those characteristic of postverbal NPs
in pro-drop languages. Thus in Belfast English imperatives, the VP-
final position characteristic of these preverbal NPs in pro-drop lan-
guages is not generally available; an inverted subject can occur VP-
finally if there are no other constituents in VP, but it cannot follow an
object or other constituent in the VP; although a vocative can occur
after the VP, as in standard English, a true subject cannot. Thus you can
only occur after the object of the verb where there is an intonation break
between the verb and you, indicating that it is a vocative rather than a
subject.
(150) a. Eat the apple, you.
b. *Eat the apple you.
c. Eat you the apple.
It may be objected that the presence of an obligatory intonation break is
difficult to perceive; however, there is a clearer difference between
postverbal NPs in the pro-drop languages and those in Belfast English
imperatives.
In pro-drop languages, the subject may appear in a variety of posi-

tions within the VP—a fact often attributed to restructuring at PF (see
for example Burzio 1986, Bouchard 1983); in particular, the subject can
occur between the direct object and a prepositional phrase. However,
this position is not available in Belfast English.
(151) Scrivera una lunga lettera Gianni a Paolo.

Will write a long letter Gianni to Paolo.
(152) a. Write you a long letter to Paolo
b. *Write a long letter you to Paolo.
This fact applies irrespective of whether the subject is the pronoun you
or a full NP.
(153) a. Write everybody a long letter to

Paolo.
b. *Write a long letter everybody to
Paolo.
The only case where the subject can occur after the object is where the
object is a weak pronoun, when the order verb-object-subject occurs.
(154) a. Eat them you now.

b. Eat you them now.
Note that this ordering cannot simply be a consequence of some low-
level reordering of elements within VP, putting weak pronouns first.
The order is not necessarily weak pronouns followed by other NPs; thus
both orders in (154) are possible, with the stressed pronoun you in (b)
preceding the weak object pronoun. Moveover, a non-pronominal sub-
ject can also precede a weak pronoun.
(155) Take everybody them home.
Furthermore, if there were in general the possibility of low-level

reordering within VP in English, one would expect to find examples
like (156).
(156) *I gave it the children (= 'I gave the children it').

But such reordering is not generally possible, and certainly does not
occur in Belfast English.
Thus, the postverbal subject in Belfast imperatives does not seem
similar to the postverbal subjects found in the pro-drop languages, and
the superficially attractive explanation for postverbal subjects in Belfast

imperatives, in terms of pro-drop, does not seem to be the correct one.
Assuming an analysis with a VP-internal subject in SPEC/VP, then,
there is only one possible other source of VS order: the verb has moved
out of VP, and the subject has either remained in situ or raised to a node
lower than that to which the verb has moved (for example, the verb is in
C and the subject in SPEC/AGRS (as in English questions) or the verb is
in AGRS and the subject in SPEC/TP (as proposed by Bobaljik and
Jonas 1992 for Irish). The question then arises as to where the verb has
moved to.
Earlier we argued in considering dialect A, that Tense was not instan-
tiated in imperatives. Thus, it cannot be the case that the subject is mov-
ing to SPEC/Tense and the verb to AGRS. Let us then consider the pos-
sibility that the verb is moving to C.
At certain stages in the history of English, imperatives have patterned
with questions in having inversion of the I-to-C type; thus Pintzuk
(1991) points out that imperatives pattern with questions in Old Eng-
lish, in that pronouns, which generally appear before the finite verb,
appear following the verb in negatives and questions; she uses this to
argue that, in imperatives and questions, the verb is in C.
(157) beo du on ofeste.
be you in haste.
'Be quick.'
(Beowulf 386)
(158) hwi sciole we obres marines niman

why should we another man's take
'Why should we take those of another man?'
(AELS24.188)
and in the King James Bible, there is inversion in imperatives, for
example:
(159) Be ye not proud.
There are some apparent problems with this analysis, however. First,
note that in general in English, most verbs cannot raise out of VP;
where a verb is required in a higher position, do-support is needed.
Raising is restricted to auxiliaries and the verbs be and have.
Note that verb-raising in imperatives differs from other types of rais-
ing in that it does not distinguish be, have, and auxiliaries from other
verbs.
(160) Be you good.

(161) Have you a good time.
(162) Go you home.
(163) Eat you your dinner.
This in itself does not of course mean that movement to C has not
taken place in (160)-(163); it could be that some characteristic of
imperatives means that all verbs must raise here, and not only be and
have. However, we would have to explain why do-support is not neces-
sary in imperatives.
A second problem arises in relation to the position of negation in
imperatives. Movement to C necessarily means that the verb has moved
over negation and adverbs; as we noted above, the position of the verb
to the left of negatives and adverbs is generally taken to be diagnostic of
the movement of the verb at least as far as I. The inverted verb in imper-
atives does indeed seem to be able to move over adverbs.
(164) Read you quickly that book.
(165) Do you immediately your homework.
Notice incidentally that in (164) and (165), the verb and object are not
adjacent, showing that the general adjacency requirement between verb
and object in English is not absolute and reinforcing the view that there
is no requirement for the verb and object to be adjacent at S-structure
for Case reasons.
It appears, then, that the verb has risen above adverbs, that is, out of
VP. However, in inverted imperatives, the verb may not precede nega-
tion.
(166) *Read you not that.
(167) *Be you not stupid.
This might seem to indicate that the verb raises to a node between nega-
tion and adverbs, as in French infinitives for example, where it has been
argued that the verb raises to AGR0, since it follows negatives and pre-
cedes adverbs.
(168) ne pas ecouter souvent la radio
not to listen to often the radio
However, the situation is not quite so straightforward; negation in

overt-subject imperatives differs from that in other sentence types. In
general, negation with lexical verbs is marked by don't or do not. But in
overt-subject imperatives, only don't is possible; do not may not occur.
(169) a. Don't you eat that.

b. *Do you not eat that.
c. *Do not you eat that.
Compare the question forms

(170) Don't you eat that?
(171) Do you not eat that?
This suggests that we may not be dealing here with a combination of

the negative not with do-support, but rather, as suggested by Beukema
and Coopmans (1989) and Zhang (1991) with an invariant negative
marker, don't. There is evidence from standard English that don't is in
C in that variety. For as we argued in the last chapter, the subject in
standard English seems to be uniformly in SPEC/AGRS. Don't must
therefore be in a higher node, that is, in C.
(172) a. Don't you do that.
b. * You don't do that.
There is evidence that the inverted verb in Belfast English occupies

the same position as don't from the fact that inversion is incompatible
with don't', negative imperatives cannot have inversion, except where
they are unaccusative or passive and the apparent inversion does not
involve verb movement but rather lack of subject raising, as in dialect A.
(173) a. *Don't touch you that.
b. Don't you touch that.
(174) a. Don't go you away.
b. Don't you go away.
It is well known that, in general, verb movement to C is excluded

where there is a lexical element in C; thus for example in the Germanic
Verb-second languages, such as German, the verb cannot move to C
where the complementiser position is filled (for futher discussion of
this, see Chapter 4).
There is also evidence that the inverted verb in dialect B is in C, from
the interaction of imperative inversion with the NEG criterion, (Rizzi
1991), that is, the requirement that where certain negative elements are
in SPEC/CP, a verbal element must move to C.
Consider the interaction of elements which require an overt element
in C, to satisfy the NEG criterion, with overt subject imperatives. In
standard English overt-subject imperatives cannot co-occur with these.
(175) *Under no circumstances you go away.

(176) *On no account you close the door.
Note that in non-imperatives, such expressions trigger obligatory
inversion, with do-support as required.
(177) Under no circumstances do they go away.

(178) On no account should they close the door.
Do-support is however unavailable in imperatives.
(179) *Under no circumstances do you go away.

(180) *On no account do you close the door.
These are of course grammatical if they are not imperatives; to be sure

that they are ungrammatical as imperatives, we need to look at cases
where the verb in imperatives and indicatives differs.
(181 )SE *Under no circumstances do everybody sit down.

(182)SE *On no account do anybody move.
Moreover, have, be, and auxiliaries cannot raise, even when an ele-
ment is required in C because of the presence of an inversion-triggering
element in SPEC/CP. This suggests that in standard English there is
some element in C already which blocks the raising of verbs into C, but
which, because it is not overt, is insufficient to satisfy the requirement
that an element appear in C.
(183)SE *Under no circumstances be you impertinent.

(184)SE *On no account have you another day off.
The element in C in standard English imperatives is very possibly an
empty modal: both Kayne (1991), for Italian, and den Dikken (1992),
for Dutch, argue for the presence of empty modals in imperatives.
Kayne makes the case that in Italian, the placing of clitic pronouns in
negative infinitival imperatives can be explained if there is an empty
modal present. Although in general in Italian clitics follow the infini-
tive, in these imperatives they can precede it.
(185) a. Gianni ha deciso di farlo.

Gianni has decided to do it
b. Gianni ha deciso di lo fare.
it to do
(186) a. Nonfarlo.
not to do it
'Don't do it.'
b. Non lo fare.
it to do
'Don't do it.'
Kayne argues where clitics precede the infinitive, they are in fact
attached to an empty modal, rather than being left-adjoined to the infini-
tive; the presence of this empty modal in imperative infinitives (but not
other infinitives) explains the different order possibilities in imperatives.
Den Dikken argues that in Dutch the possibility of placing an object
NP on the right periphery of imperatives containing a resultative phrase
derives from the movement of an empty operator associated with the
object to the specifier position of a modal phrase. The right peripheral
position is available only in imperatives, and not in indicatives.
(187) Jan legde (die bal) neer (*die ball).
Jan put (that ball) down
(188) Leg (die bal) neer (die ball).
Put (that ball) down
The presence of a null modal in standard English imperatives would

also explain why be and have cannot raise in standard English impera-
tives; they do not do so because an empty modal is present, and that
being so, they remain in VP, as they do generally when an auxiliary is
present. It would also explain the impossibility of modals occurring in
imperatives. Many modals are undoubtedly excluded from imperatives
for semantic reasons, but even those which are not cannot occur in
imperatives. Thus, the modal can is excluded from imperatives, even
though be able, which has a very similar meaning, is not.
(189) * You can swim before the end of the holidays.
(190) You be able to swim before the end of the holidays.
Thus it seems that in standard English imperatives, C is filled by a null
modal; this is insufficient in itself to satisfy the NEG criterion, but it
prevents movement of verbs to C, so that there is no way for the NEG
criterion to be satisfied; for that reason, negative elements cannot occur
in SPEC/CP.
Compare the situation in Belfast English. Here, in dialect B, inverted
imperatives are grammatical after negative elements in SPEC/CP, so
that (183) and (184) are grammatical in this variety, as are examples
where the lexical verb has inverted.
(191) Under no cirumstances speak you to them.
(192) On no account open you that door.
suggesting that the verb in Belfast English has moved into C, thus satis-
fying the NEG criterion. The difference between Belfast English and
standard English then would be that in Belfast English, the element in C
is not an empty modal but an affix to which the verb can move.
There is further evidence of verb-raising in dialect B in the placement
of weak object pronouns. It is well known that in the Scandinavian lan-
guages, raising of the lexical verb triggers leftward movement of weak
object pronouns (see for example Holmberg 1986, 1992; Vikner 1991),
and it will be argued that this is also what is happening in Belfast Eng-
lish imperatives. The following example (from Vikner 1991) shows the
operation of object shift in Danish.
(193) a. I gar laeste Peter den uden tvivl ikke.
Yesterday read Peter it without doubt not
b. *I gar laeste Peter uden tvivl den ikke
c. *I gar laeste Peter uden tvivl ikke den
In order to show that object shift is happening in Belfast English
imperatives, we need to exclude the possibility that the object pronoun is
simply cliticising to the verb and raising with it. Two main factors show
that in fact this cannot be the case. First, although weak object pronouns
must precede adverbs in inverted structures, they may appear either
before or after the subject; the fact that they do not necessarily tag on to
the verb seems to indicate that they are not clitics. Note that the subject
itself need not be pronominal, so that attachment to the subject cannot be
analysed as attachment to an array of clitics attached to the verb.
(194) a. Read it everybody quickly,
b. Read everybody it quickly.
Second, there is evidence that weak pronouns are not clitics which
attach to verbs in the behaviour of such pronouns with the verb have
when it raises in English.
In British English (and Hiberno-English) have as a main verb may
raise to AGRS (and thence to C):
(195) a. I haven't any books.
b. I have always a lot of work.
c. Has John the answers?
Now if weak object pronouns could cliticise to V, one would expect

them to be able to raise to C with have. But this is absolutely ungram-
matical
(196) a. *Has them John?
b. Has John them?
Likewise, it seems impossible for pronouns to occur above not, though
here the findings are complicated by the fact that it seems more or less
obligatory for have + not to appear as haven't
(197) a. ??I have not the books,
b. I haven't the books.
(198) a. ??I have not them.
b. I haven't them.
c. *I have them not.
Example (198c) seems rather worse than (198a), although neither is
particularly good, seeming to show that weak pronouns cannot cliticise
to the verb in negatives either, though as we have noted the evidence is
not as clear as with questions.1
We noted above that weak object pronouns can occur either between
the verb and the subject or after the subject in inverted imperatives,
whereas other objects can only appear after the subject.
(199) a. Read it you to me.
b. Read you it to me.
(200) a. *Read the book you to me.
b. Read you the book to me.
(201) a. Throw Graham you your end there.
b. Throw us you your end there.
Moreover, note the position of weak pronoun objects in relation to
adverbs; although they may precede or follow the subject, weak object
pronouns in inverted imperatives always appear before adverbs.
(202) a. Read it always you to me.
b. Read you it always to me.
c. *Read always it you to me.
d. *Read you always it to me.
It seems that the object pronouns must raise to a position above
adverbs, presumably SPEC/AGRoP, but the subject may either remain
in situ in SPEC/VP or raise to a projection above the one to which the

object raises. We return to the look at the subject position in more detail
later.
The movement of the object affects the class of weak pronouns, as in
mainland Scandinavian languages. Thus, it does not apply to co-ordi-
nated pronouns, stressed pronouns, or the uns class of pronouns dis-
cussed in the previous chapter.
(203) a. Put them you in the living room,
b. Put you them in the living room.
(204) a. *Put them and me you in the living room.
b. Put you them and me in the living room.
(205) a. *Put THEM you in the living room.
b. Put you THEM in the living room.
(206) a. *Put THEMUNS you in the living room.
b. Put you THEMUNS in the living room.
Moreover, it is dependent on raising of the main verb, again as in the

Scandinavian languages. The object cannot raise unless the main verb
does.
(207) a. Tell you her carefully the story.
b. Tell her carefully you the story.
(208) a. *Her carefully you tell the story.
b. *You her carefully tell the story.
(209) a. *Be you her carefully telling the story when I get back.
b. *Be her carefully you telling the story when I get back.
In the Scandinavian languages, object shift moves the object in front

of negation and adverbs. In Belfast English, it is difficult to tell whether
it moves the object in front of negation or not, because negation is
marked in imperatives, not by a negative marker in NEG P, but by a
negative in the C position, don't.
Object shift is obligatory for weak pronouns, again as in the Scandi-
navian languages. Weak pronouns must precede sentential adverbs.
(210) a. Give you them always your full attention.
b. *Give you always them your full attention.
It is interesting that object shift, which occurs in the Scandinavian
languages when the main verb raises out of VP, also comes into opera-
tion in English, a language which in general does not have main verb-
raising to C, where a dialect has a construction which involves the
movement of the verb to C. Speakers who allow inversion with all
verbs in imperatives, which we have analysed as verb movement to C,
all seem to have object shift; I have been unable to find any speakers
who allow widespread inversion but do not have object shift. In a sense,
it seems as if English has "latent" object shift, which in most varieties
does not show up because of lack of main verb-raising, but surfaces
when a dialect contains a construction involving main verb-raising.
We now turn to look at the position of the subject in dialect B imper-
atives. The question arises as to why the subject may either precede or
follow an object which has undergone object shift.
(211) a. Throw you us your end there.
b. Throw us you your end there.
(212) a. Find you it if you can.
b. Find it you if you can.
It seems that the difference in order is caused by raising or non-raising

of the subject out of the SPEC/VP position. Where it follows the object,
the subject must also follow any sentential adverbs.
(213) a. Tell you them always the truth.
b. Tell them always you the truth.
c. *Tell them you always the truth.
That non-raising of the subject is an option in dialect B is shown by

the fact that the subject may appear after the lexical verb in unac-
cusatives and passives which have auxiliaries. In these structures, the
auxiliary will raise to C, leaving the lexical verb in VP. If the subject
occurs after that lexical verb, then it must be in situ.
(214) Be running you up to the rostrum just as the VIPs come in.
(215) Have gone you out before I get back.
(216) Be picked youse for the team or I'll get mad.
Similar considerations apply to negatives. Where raising of the verb

to C is precluded by the presence of don't in C, and the verb is unac-
cusative, the subject can occur after the lexical verb.
(217) Don't go you away.
(218) Don't sit youse down till you're told.
Thus subject-raising seems to be optional, indicating that the NP fea-

ture of AGRS is optionally strong. In order to cope with the imperative
facts here, we will need to admit into the theory the possibility that a
node may have not only either weak or strong features but also features
which may be either weak or strong.
The variant position of the subject and object when object shift
occurs, then, arises not because of any difference in object position but
because subject raising is optional. Where the subject precedes the
object, it is in SPEC/AGRSP, as in (219); where it follows the object, it
has remained in situ in SPEC/VP (or in certain cases in a position after
the verb in VP) and thus follows the object which is in SPEC/AGR0, as
in (220).
Thus, dialect B shares with dialect A the optionality of subject-raising.

We argued that this derived from the optional weakness of the NP-fea-
ture of AGRS, together with the fact that there is no Tense content in
imperatives, so that the usual mechanism which forces the subject out
of VP in Belfast English when AGRS is weak, that is, the strong NP-fea-
ture of Tense, is not present. Where dialects A and B differ is in the
availability of verb-raising. In dialect A, the verb remains in the VP; in
dialect B, it may raise to C, which contains an imperative marker whose
V-feature is strong.
We argued in the previous chapter that, in order for raising to C to
take place, the V-feature of intermediate categories had to be strong, so
that raising was forced at each stage. It seems not unlikely that the V-
feature of AGRS in imperatives could be strong, given that AGRS is capa-
ble of identifying an empty category in imperatives; for null subject

imperatives do occur, with an obligatory second person interpretation.2
(221) Go away.
(222) Read that.
We have also argued that in imperatives in Belfast English, the verb

raises to C. One question that arises, if this analysis is correct, is why
main verbs can raise here, but not in questions, where only be and have
raise, other verbs requiring do-support. We need to explain why main
verbs can raise here, but not in questions and negatives. One would
expect that if main verbs cannot raise to C in questions, they should
equally be unable to raise in imperatives; it would be expected that as
Jo-support is required in questions with verbs other than have and be, it
would also be required in imperatives. But we have noted that do-sup-
port is impossible in imperatives. One reason for the lack of do-support
is that do is inserted under Tense, and we have argued that Tense is not
instantiated in imperatives; this explains only the lack of Jo-support,
however, and not the general availability of verb movement to C. We
need to consider why a difference exists between imperatives and other
constructions in relation to verb-raising. The answer would seem to lie
in the fact that the verb feature of C and AGRS is strong, forcing raising
in the syntax. On the contrary, the V- features of these nodes are weak
in questions, triggering raising in the overt syntax only of those verbs
which cannot raise at LF.
Finally, let us consider the imperative verb away, which as noted ear-
lier only occurs in imperatives and obligatorily moves to C. It seems
that we must regard this as a verb lexically specified as having a strong
imperative feature, which must therefore move to C for checking in the
syntax.
Summarising our findings about dialect B, then, we have argued that
it is similar to dialect A in that subject-raising is optional, but it differs
from dialect A in that the verb moves to C. When this verb movement
occurs, weak object pronouns obligatorily undergo object shift into
SPEC/AGR0.
Conclusion
It has been shown here that there is more than one possible grammar in
relation to imperatives, depending on whether or not the verb raises,
and whether or not the subject raises, before spell-out. These possibili-
ties are available within the Minimalist approach to parameter setting,
and are used in Belfast English but not in standard English.
Although the possibility of leaving the subject in situ can be seen to
relate to the general optionality of movement to SPEC/AGRSP in
Belfast English, the availability of verb-raising is restricted to impera-
tives, and thus is essentially construction specific; it involves a state-
ment about the strength of the V-feature of a particular morpheme in C,
the imperative morpheme, rather than about C in general. As noted in
Chapter 2, the grammar must be able to include statements about the
strength or weakness of particular items in a node, as well as general
statements about that node. Although this increases the power of the
grammar, it seems to be empirically necessary; moreover, given the
very strongly restricted range of options available within the Minimalist
program, it does not seem that it will make parameter setting unneces-
sarily difficult.
Consider the child, endowed with an innately specified Universal
Grammar, acquiring Belfast English. Assume that the child has set the
parameters affecting the position of the subject and verb in general, that
is, that the NP feature of Tense is strong (forcing subject-raising), but the
V-feature of Tense is weak, so that the verb generally remains within
VP. The child then encounters inverted imperatives, which do not fit into
the current grammar. There appear to be only a small number of possible
analyses available. Either the subject does not raise, meaning that the
NP-feature of some element is weak in imperatives; or the verb does
raise, meaning that the V-feature of some element is strong in impera-
tives. There is a very restricted choice of possible grammars, so that,
even if strength or weakness has to be specified for individual functional
elements rather than whole categories, the available possibilities are suf-
ficiently restricted for learning to take place easily.
One very interesting aspect of Belfast English imperatives is the
changes which appear to be in progress. The trend is approximately as
follows. For older speakers, widespread inversion is usually possible,
while among younger speakers dialect A prevails, and among many of
the youngest speakers—children under about 12— there is no inver-
sion, the grammar in relation to imperatives being like standard Eng-
lish. Now what is particularly noteworthy is that children learning
Belfast English, and whose parents presumably provide a significant
proportion of their input, often have grammars which do not admit
inversion, and they judge it ungrammatical. It is well known that par-

ents address a significant number of imperatives to their children, so
that, even though inversion is optional, the input to the language faculty
on which learning was based must have included many inverted imper-
atives. Nevertheless, the children have established grammars which do
not permit inversion. Similarly, there are children of dialect B-speaking
parents, who have developed a dialect A grammar. What is clear from
this is that language learning does not involve selecting a grammar
which fits all the data. Rather, it must involve selecting, from the
options provided by UG, the grammar which best fits the majority of
the data.
It is also noteworthy that there appear to be only three possible gram-
mars: one involving the non-raising of the verb, as in dialect A, one
involving verb-raising to C as in dialect B, and one involving subject-
raising but no verb-raising, as in standard English. There do not appear
to be other possibilities. If speakers were hypothesising rules, rather
than selecting from a small number of UG possibilities, one would
expect a wider range of possibilities; for example, learners who had
input from both dialect A and dialect B speakers might hypothesise that
inversion was possible with any verb which did not have an object, on
the basis of the observation that the majority of inversion was happen-
ing with such verbs; such an observation is likely to be made because
inversion occurs with verbs without surface objects in both dialect A
and dialect B, but only with verbs which have objects in dialect A; such
a hypothesis would cover a large proportion of the data. Similarly, even
though in most dialect B imperatives the subject follows the lexical
verb, there is not a possible grammar in which the subject always fol-
lows the lexical verb, even when don't or an auxiliary is present. Again,
such a grammar would fit most of the data, but would not accord with
UG: there is no way of deriving the order auxiliary-lexical verb-subject-
object, as in (223).
(223) *Be eating you your dinner when I get back.
Thus, it seems that the task of the language learner is not to hypothe-
sise or select, or even set the parameters corresponding to a grammar
which can generate all the data in the input, rather it is to determine
which grammar, from among the limited range made available by UG,
can accommodate the majority of the data in the input. There may also
be a preference for the simplest possible grammar; thus, a grammar
where the V-feature of C is uniformly weak may be preferred over one

where C is generally strong but a specific element which can appear in
C is strong, and may be the one selected by the learner unless there is
very strong counter-evidence; hence, the possibility of a child develop-
ing a grammar without inversion in the face of input containing not
infrequent examples of inverted structures.
4
For To Infinitives
Belfast English is one of a number of dialects of English in which it

seems that the complementiser for may appear directly before to in
infinitives, as shown in (1) and (2) below
(1) I want for to meet them.
(2) It is difficult for to see that.
Other such varieties include Ottawa Valley English (Carroll 1983) and
Ozark English (mentioned briefly in Chomsky & Lasnik 1977, Chomsky
1981, Roster & May 1982).
In standard English, for never appears immediately before to; for
appears before a lexical subject, but is absent where the subject is PRO.
The standard, pre-Minimalist, view of this (see for example Chomsky
1981) has been that the subject position of infinitives is ungoverned and
thus not Case-marked; it could therefore be PRO, considered to occur
only in ungoverned positions; if there is a lexical subject, this must be
Case-marked in another way, for example by for which governs and
Case-marks the subject position. Where for occurs, a PRO subject
should be impossible since the subject position is governed.
(3) a. For John to win would be amazing,
b. *John to win would be amazing.
(4) a. To win would be amazing.
b. *For to win would be amazing.
The status of PRO within the Minimalist framework is less clear, but
it seems likely that the restrictions on the occurrence of PRO can be
derived along the following lines: PRO is not Case-marked, and there-
81
fore cannot move to a checking position to check and delete a Case-affix,

but must remain in situ, in SPEC/VP. It therefore cannot occur in any
derivation where there is a Case-affix for it to raise to; if there is such an
affix, it will remain undeleted and the derivation will crash. Thus, as in
the standard analysis of PRO, it should be in complementary distribution
with full NPs, which need to move to Case positions for checking.
The grammaticality of examples like (4b) in the for to dialects thus
appears contrary to the prediction of these analyses; it contains a
position where Case can be checked/assigned, as shown by the gram-
maticality of overt subject infinitives containing for, and it contains
a PRO, which cannot check Case or, in an earlier perspective, be
governed.
In this chaper we consider why Belfast English permits for to infini-
tives but standard English does not. It will be argued that in Belfast
English for is optionally a clitic, attaching to to, while in standard Eng-
lish/or cannot cliticise.
The chapter begins with an outline of the major characteristics of the
distribution of for to in Belfast English. Next, the analysis of these facts
will be discussed. It will be shown that the for which occurs in for to
constructions is the complementiser for, it will then be argued that
Belfast English allows for to cliticise to to, this single characteristic
accounting for a variety of facts about the dialect. The cliticisation pro-
posed is a form of lowering, a process which has been argued to be
unusual if not impossible in the syntax (see for example Chomsky
1992). It will be argued, however, that complementiser-lowering occurs
in other languages and is a special type of lowering which escapes the
general constraints on lowering imposed by Universal Grammar.
The third section of this chapter considers the relationship between
Belfast English and the other for to dialects, concluding that there is not
a unified for to phenomenon, the occurrence of for to arising from dif-
ferent characteristics in other dialects. The chapter then concludes with
a summary of the findings.
The Use of for to in Belfast English

There are two distinct for to dialects spoken in Northern Ireland. One,
which I will term the "weak" for to dialect, is relatively widespread
throughout the north of Ireland; it uses for to only in purpose clauses, as
in (5) and (6).
For To Infinitives 83
(5) I went to the shop for to get bread.

(6) They are going home for to see their parents.
This is in fact the more common variety, and the majority of for to
speakers restrict their use to this type of clause. Finlay (1988), in a
study of the speech of Belfast schoolchildren, found examples of for to
only in purpose clauses, suggesting that the variety of Belfast English
featuring a wider use of for to may be restricted to older speakers and
hence is disappearing.
It is, however, to the less common, and more interesting, "strong" for
to variety, which uses for to as an alternative to to in the majority of
infinitive types, that we turn our attention here; this variety appears to
be restricted to Belfast and a few other areas, including south Armagh
and west Tyrone.1
In the strong for to variety of Belfast English, what is striking is that
for to can occur in infinitives in a range of different positions, contrary
to the data reported for other for to dialects, where usage seems to be
limited to those infinitives which are the complement of want-type
verbs and adjectives, which in standard English take for complements,
for example want and difficult. In addition to these environments,
Belfast English uses/or to infinitives in a variety of other cases.
Infinitives with Null Subjects

Belfast English uses for to instead of the standard English to quite
freely with "subjectless" infinitives. As Chomsky (1981) points out, the
occurrence of for with PRO subjects in the for to dialects presents
something of a problem for classic Government and Binding theory,
since this PRO would appear to be governed; we return to discuss this
in the following section, under the heading Analysis of the for to Con-
struction in Belfast English.
In addition to occurring with wanf-type verbs as in (1), for to occurs
for example in isolated infinitives used as exclamations:
(7) For to let that mongrel into my yard!
(8) For to tell her like that!
Belfast English also uses for to with infinitives in "subject" position.2

(9) For to stay here would be just as expensive.
(10) For to pay the mortgage is difficult.
Moreover, for to can be used even with verbs which do not take for in
standard English, and which are usually assumed not to be subcate-
gorised for the for complementiser.
(11) I tried for to get them.

The use of for to after try has also been reported in Ozark (see Chom-
sky & Lasnik (1977), Carroll (1983)); however, in Ozark try apparently
permits a lexical subject, whereas this is not the case in Belfast English;
a sentence like (12), which is grammatical in Ozark is completely
ungrammatical in Belfast English.
(12) OE/*BE I tried for him to go home.

For to also occurs with "object control" verbs.
(13) I persuaded John for to go home.

(14) She convinced them for to give up.
However, there is one instance where we never find for to and that is
after whether, which in Belfast English acts as a wh-complementiser.
(15) *I don't know whether for to go.

As we shall see later, this is one indication that for of for to is the same
item as the complementiser for.
Infinitives with Lexical Subjects

In the case of most infinitives with a lexical subject, for must occur
before the subject, just as in standard English, and for to does not occur.
This is presumably because, as in standard English, for is required in
order to assign Case to the lexical subject, which otherwise would not
receive Case and would thus violate the Case Filter, which requires that
all lexical NPs have Case.
The requirement that for occur before the lexical subject applies to
infinitives in most positions— for example to those in "subject" position:
(16) a. For him to pay the mortgage would be just as expensive.

b. *Him for to pay the mortgage would be just as expensive.
c. *For him for to pay the mortgage would be just as expensive.
to infinitives which are in "extraposition"
(17) a. It was stupid for them to do that.

b. *It was stupid them for to do that.
c. *It was stupid for them for to do that.
to complements of adjectives:
(18) a. Mary was keen for them to be there.
b. *Mary was keen them for to be there.
c. *Mary was keen for them for to be there.
and also to the complements of want-type verbs where something
appears between the matrix verb and the embedded subject
(19) a. I want very much for him to get accepted.
b. *I want very much him for to get accepted.
c. *I want very much for him for to get accepted.
Two occurrences of for are impossible, as (16c), (17c), (18c), and
(19c) show. For to cannot co-occur with for.
However, Belfast English, unlike the other for to varieties so far as I
am aware, places for to after the lexical subject where the infinitive is
the complement of a want-type verb (provided that the lexical subject
occurs directly after want).
(20) I wanted Jimmy for to come with me.

(21) I don't like the children for to be out late.
In fact, this is the only place where for can occur in this structure. Sen-
tences like (22), which are grammatical in some other dialects, are
ungrammatical in this variety.
(22) *I wanted for Jimmy to come with me.

For to speakers can, like standard speakers, omit the for entirely
(23) I wanted Jimmy to come with me.

The only case where for can precede the lexical subject in such con-
structions is where something intervenes between the matrix verb and
the complement, as in (19a) above.
It might be thought that in structures like (20) and (21), the NP which
appears to be the subject of the infinitive could in fact be part of the
main clause, so that the structure of examples like (20) would be:
(24) I wanted Jimmy [for PRO to come with me].
However, the same construction occurs with the expletive there, which
is restricted to subject position, showing clearly that for to can indeed
occur after the infinitival subject
(25) I want there for to be some peace and quiet sometime.
(26) I'd hate there for to be ill-feeling.
For to with "S' deleting " verbs

For to occurs in cases where under standard analyses one would not
expect a complementiser to be present at all, for example after raising
verbs, as in (21 a). Raising is nevertheless obligatory with such verbs in
Belfast English, just as in standard English; despite the presence of for
as a potential Case-marker/checker, the lexical subject may not remain
in situ, as (27b) shows
(27) a. John seems for to be better,
b. *It seems for John to be better.
It also occurs with Exceptional Case-Marking (ECM) verbs, as in (28a).
Here, for and to must occur together after the subject; for may not occur
before the subject, as (28b) shows
(28) a. I believe them for to have done it.
b. *I believe for them to have done it.
Negatives in for to Infinitives

There is an apparently curious fact about negative for to infinitives, and
that is that the negative not always follows for to; it cannot occur
between/or and to. Nor can it precede for.
(29) a. I would prefer them for to not go.
b. *I would prefer them for not to go.
c. *I would prefer them not for to go.
(30) a. For to not go would be foolish.
b. *Not for to go would be foolish.
c. *For not to go would be foolish.
However, where for precedes the lexical subject, a negative may
occur before or after to, as in standard English, with the position before
to being preferred.
(31) a. I would prefer very much for them not to go.

b. I would prefer very much for them to not go.
(32) a. For John not to go would be foolish,
b. For John to not go would be foolish.
My data contains a number of examples where the speaker uses a for

to infinitive with a negative, and subsequently modifies this to a form
without for, at the same time altering the relative position of to and the
negative: all are of the following form, with the sequence for to not,
altered to not to:
(33) I wouldn't like my children for to not marry .. . not to marry.
It is to be expected that there is some unified explanation for the facts

of for to use in Belfast English, a difference between the two varieties
which triggers the various features we have noted above; and that is
indeed what we propose in the next section.
Analysis of the for to Construction in Belfast English
The Status of for

Before we go on to analyse the Belfast English data, we need to exclude
one possibility: that is, that, as the Oxford English Dictionary suggests,
for to is simply a lexical variant of to in some varieties; if that were the
case, the difference between standard English and Belfast English
would be simply that they had infinitival markers with different phono-
logical shapes, to and for to, and the difference would be of little syn-
tactic interest.
It is not difficult to show that this is not the case, however; we have
seen a number of cases where to is possible but for to is not. Thus for to
does npt occur where there is a for complementiser present, as (19c)
repeated below shows.
(19c) *I want very much for him for to get accepted.
Its failure to occur with for suggests that the for of for to is in fact the
complementiser itself. This is reinforced by the fact that it cannot co-
occur with whether, as shown in (15), repeated below.
(15) *I don't know whether for to go.
Note that for to can in general occur with wh-words; thus sentences
like (34) and (35) are grammatical.
(34) I don't know where for to go.
(35) He wasn't sure what for to do.
This is exactly what we would predict if both whether and for are com-
plementisers; for can co-occur with wh-words which appear in the
(SPEC/CP) position, but not with another item which occurs in the
complementiser position itself. Thus, the lack of for to after whether
arises because the complementiser position is already filled by whether.
The suggestion that whether is a complementiser is, however, not
uncontroversial. In particular, it is in contradiction to the analysis pro-
posed by Kayne (1990) following suggestions by Larson (1985). Kayne
argues that whether occurs in SPEC/CP, and that this explains the con-
trast between whether (which allows the wh-infinitive construction) and
if, which does not, as shown in (36a & b) below.
(36) a. He doesn't know whether to go to the movies.
b. *He doesn't know if to go to the movies.
According to Kayne's analysis, the presence of a lexical complementiser

is incompatible with PRO; if, being in C°, cannot therefore be followed
by PRO, but whether, being like other wh-words in SPEC/CP, can do so.
In Belfast English, however, although the judgements on (36a & b)
are as in standard English, there is evidence that whether is in fact in C.
One type of evidence comes from the pattern of occurrence of that after
wh-words. In Belfast English, for many speakers, that can occur after a
wh-element,3 as in (37) and (38).
(37) I don't know when that he's going.
(38) It depends who that I see.
However, whether never co-ocurs with that
(39) *I don't know whether that he's going.
Thus in Belfast English whether differs from other wh-words in that
it cannot co-occur with a complementiser, which seems to indicate that
whether is not in SPEC/CP but in C° itself.
A further argument for whether being in C comes from the occur-
rence of subject-auxiliary inversion in embedded clauses. As
McCloskey (1992b) notes, Hiberno-English dialects allow inversion in
embedded questions (for further discussion of this, see Chapter 5).
(40) I wonder did he get there on time.

(41) They asked him was he by himself.
(42) I wonder what street does he live in.
(43) The man on the door asked her who had she come to see.
However, such inversion is impossible with whether
(45) a. *I wonder whether did he get there on time,
b. I wonder whether he got there on time.
(45) a. *They asked him whether was he by himself,
b. They asked him whether he was by himself.
Assuming that the inversion here is the same process as in matrix sen-
tences, that is, the movement of I (=AGRs)to C, the reason for its being
blocked with whether falls out naturally if whether is in C; since C is
already filled, I cannot move to it. That this is the correct analysis is
confirmed by the fact that inversion is also impossible with that.
(46) a. *I wonder what street that does he live in.
b. I wonder what street that he lives in.
(47) a. *The man on the door asked her who that had she come to see.
b. The man on the door asked her who that she had come to see.
Thus whether in Belfast English does appear to be in C, and so to be
in complementary distribution with other elements which occur in that
position. The fact that it does not occur with for, then, indicates that for
is also a complementiser.
Carroll (1983), in her study of Ottawa Valley English, argues that the
for of for to infinitives is not in fact the complementiser for but the
preposition for associated with certain verbs such as want and like. This
may indeed be the case in that variety, a possibility to which we will
return later. However, it is clearly not the case in Belfast English; there,
for to infinitives occur in isolation, as in (7) and (8) repeated below
(7) For to let that mongrel into my yard!
(8) For to tell her like that!
Moreover, in certain constructions, the for preposition and the for com-
plementiser can surface
(48) What I'm longing for is for to have a break.4
If, however, for is a complementiser, certain questions immediately
arise.
a. How is it that PRO is permitted after for, a position in which lexical

NPs also occur?
b. How can the lexical subject occur before the complementiser?
c. Why should the positioning of negatives be influenced by the pres-
ence or absence of a complementiser?
d. How can \hefor complementiser occur with verbs which are nor-
mally assumed to take only IP complements?
Although the evidence above suggests that the for of for to infinitives is
indeed the for complementiser, the questions raised in a-d, above, suggest
that it differs from the normal for complementiser in a number of ways.
For with PRO Subjects

As already mentioned, one problem raised by Belfast English and the
other for to dialects is that they appear, unlike standard English, to allow
PRO in a position in which Case can be marked or checked. In the pre-
Minimalist view, this is a problem because Case is assigned under gov-
ernment, but PRO must be ungoverned, and so one would not expect to
find PRO in a position in which lexical NPs can occur. In the Minimalist
approach, as noted above, the status of PRO is less clear than in earlier
versions of syntax, but it is nevertheless evident that this type of null ele-
ment does not generally occur in a derivation in which there is a Case-
checking position which would have to be checked by PRO; we sug-
gested above that PRO is caseless and cannot move for checking, but
rather remains in SPEC/VP, a derivation in which there was a position
containing a Case feature to which no other NP could move would be
excluded because it would contain an undeleted feature and would crash.
Clearly, sentences containing afar complementiser must contain a Case-
position in which a lexical subject can be checked; it is a problem, then,
that such structures are also grammatical where the subject is PRO.
For can clearly check the Case of the subject of infinitives such as
(16a) and (17a), repeated below.
(16) a. For him to pay the mortgage would be just as expensive.
(17) a. It was stupid for them to do that.
We are left, then, with the conclusion that Belfast English appears to
contain examples of a governed/Case-checked PRO; noting that this is a
problem in analysing the for to dialects, Chomsky (1981) suggests that,
in those dialects, for is optionally a governor. However, although this
will produce the correct results in terms of allowing subjectless infini-
lives with for to to occur, it fails to account for the other features of
Belfast English we have noted, namely, the restrictions on negative
placement and the occurrence of lexical subjects before for, for we
would expect to be able to get a negative like (49) if for is optionally a
governor, or optionally made Case-checking available.
(49) *For PRO not to go would be stupid.
whereas, as we have seen, this is ungrammatical; moreover, there is noth-
ing in the optional governing status of for that would lead us to expect to
find a lexical subject before it, as in (20) and (21) repeated below
(21) I don't like the children for to be out late.
Note that it is not only the standard account of PRO that runs into dif-
ficulties here; thus, for example, Bouchard's (1983) proposal that it is
lack of Case rather than government which sanctions PRO also has
problems, since for is a Case assigner. Likewise, Borer's (1989)
account of infinitival subjects, under which these are not PRO but pro,
also encounters problems, for it requires an empty C slot into which
INFL can raise, and of course the complementiser position appears to
be filled in the for to construction.
Thus, we seem to have a contradiction. For appears to be a comple-
mentiser capable of governing/checking Case; but it also appears to be
able to occur with PRO. We can resolve this by claiming that, although
for is a complementiser, it may move out of the complementiser posi-
tion. More precisely, for can be a clitic in Belfast English, moving to
Tense and cliticising to to. This would not be the only example of com-
plementisers cliticising; thus Shlonsky (1988) argues that the Hebrew
complementiser se has clitic status, moving out of the complementiser
position and cliticising to INFL or the subject.
Let us explore the consequences of allowing for to cliticise to to. The
structure of a sentence like (9) above would then be:
(50) PRO for to stay here would be just as expensive.
I assume, essentially following Chomsky (1989,1992), that items
which do not enter into semantic interpretation at LF do not leave
traces, and that for is such an item. Thus, once for has moved, PRO is
ungoverned as required. The claim that for has no semantics is not
uncontroversial; a number of analyses of infinitives such as those by
Bresnan (1972), Stowell (1982) and Pesetsky (in preparation) have
argued that for has a meaning, in particular, that for clauses are unrealised
with respect to the matrix verb. These accounts draw attention to the con-
trast between infinitives with for (or which can potentially take for) and
those which cannot take for. The former are necessarily "unrealised" with
respect to the matrix verb, whereas the latter are not, as the contrast
between (51) and (52) (with for) on the one hand and (53) and (54)
(which cannot take for in standard English) on the other serves to show.
(51) I want very much for John to win.
(52) I'd like very much for John to play the piano.
(53) I remember John to be the smartest.
(54) Bill considers himself to be intelligent.
However, all of these analyses are based on the observation that there
are certain types of infinitive with which for does not occur in standard
English—in particular raising and ECM verbs—and that the comple-
ments of those verbs are not—unlike other infinitival complements—
necessarily unrealised with respect to the matrix verb. But we have
noted that this distinction does not exist in Belfast English—all infini-
tives may have for, including those which are complements of raising
and ECM verbs, as (27a) and (28a) repeated below indicate.
(27) a. John seems for to be better.
(28) a. I believe them for to have done it.
Thus for does not seem to have a semantic contribution, since any
infinitive can occur with for. Therefore the observations about the
semantic content of for cannot hold. This means that for need not be
considered as having semantic content in this dialect, and therefore the
observations about the semantics of for in standard English noted above
do not contradict our claim that for does not leave a trace.5
Shlonsky (1988) also argues that a cliticised complementiser does not
leave a trace. For in Hebrew, constructions with the cliticised comple-
mentiser se do not show thai-trace effects:
(55) Ze ha- is se- ani na'amina, se- (hu) lo ohev salat xacalim.
this the man that I believe that (he) NEG like salad eggplants
'This is the man that I believe that (he) doesn't like baba ganouj.'
There is thus independent evidence that complementisers can move

without leaving traces; and therefore the cliticisation of for we propose
can account for the occurrence of PRO subjects with for in Belfast Eng-
lish; after for has moved, the subject position is ungoverned and may be
PRO, on the standard account. Or, in a Minimalist approach, the clitici-

sation of for must ensure that it is not in a position to check Case, to
perhaps absorbing its Case properties; alternatively, the clitic version of
for may simply not be a Case-assigner.
Note that within the pre-Minimalist framework, what we are claim-
ing in relation to these structures indicates would mean that that PRO be
ungoverned; in particular, before the movement of for, PRO is clearly
governed in a structure like:
(56) I want for PRO to go.
It is only when cliticisation takes place that PRO is ungoverned, as in (57).

(57) I want PRO for to go.
That PRO need not be ungoverned at D-structure is fairly uncontrover-

sial; it presumably also applies in sentences like (58).
(58) John tried PRO to be liked t.
In the D-structure of which PRO is governed by liked.

This, and the Belfast English cases, seem to provide clear evidence
that the requirement that PRO be ungoverned could not be one which
applies throughout the derivation. It is not a condition on the insertion
of PRO into a tree, but rather a PF or LF condition.
Negation and for to Infinitives

As noted above, where an infinitive is preceded by for to, the negative
not must occur after for to, as shown in (29) and (30), repeated below.
(29) a. I would prefer them for to not go.
b. *I would prefer them not for to go,
c. *I would prefer them for not to go.
(30) a. For to not go would be foolish.
b. *Not for to go would be foolish.
c. *For not to go would be foolish.
If for is in C there is no obvious explanation for this; there would appear

to be no reason why the presence of a complementiser should affect the
placement of not. However, if our claim that for cliticises to to is correct,
then the reasons become clearer. First, it is obvious that the sequence for
not to as in (29c) and (30c) will be unable to occur because for to will
form a single unit. (The sequence for PRO not to go is of course ruled
out, as PRO cannot occur in this position). Second, we can explain, in a

rather more complex way, the impossibility of not appearing before for.
To see how, we need to look at the position of negation.
Many treatments of negatives (for example Chomsky 1989, Laka
1990) propose to account for the placement of negatives by postulating
a NEG P, headed by the negative element not in English, as the location
of negatives. NEG P is generally considered to be situated below TP but
above AGR0P, at least in English.
In infinitives, Pollock (1989) suggests, the to occupies the same slot

as Tense does in finite clauses. Thus, the underlying order for negative
infinitives is to + not + V. According to Pollock, the sequence not to V
is produced by the affixation of to to go, to being optionally an affix.
One problem with this, within Pollock's framework, is explaining why
to can lower to V across NEG, but Tense cannot. Chomsky (1989) sug-
gests that lowered affixes are subject to LF-raising only if they have
semantic content, since only then are they required to be present at all at
LF; affixes without semantic content (such as to) are thus not present at
LF, and so are not subject to the locality conditions (such as the HMC)
which apply there. Thus, to, which is not an item needed for semantic
interpretation at LF, can lower over the negative, while Tense affixes
cannot.
If to can host for-cliticisation in Belfast English only when it is
phonologically independent, but not when it itself cliticises, then the
ungrammaticality of examples like (29b) and (30b) (repeated below)
follows.
(29) b. *I would prefer them not for to go.

(30) b. *Not for to go would be foolish.
In (29b),/or has clearly cliticised to to, since it occurs after the infiniti-
val subject them; thus to must be the independent, non-clitic to, and so
cannot lower over the negative to affix to the verb. Similarly in (30b),
for has necessarily lowered under our analysis to leave PRO
ungoverned, and therefore to cannot be the affix and cannot move over
the negative to affix to V.
An alternative view of this, along Minimalist lines, would see to gen-
erated within VP and raising to Tense for checking. At spell-out, to
could be either still in the VP, below NEG (as in [a] or in T above NEG
(as in [b]). Since to has no semantic content, it, unlike verbs, should be
able to raise across NEG; since it will delete at LF, the improper chain
thus created will be invisible.
(60) a. They intend not to go

b. They intend to not go
Now if in Belfast English, for can only cliticise to T, then we can see
why the sequence not for to is impossible; it would involve the cliticisa-
tion of for, not to T, but to an element in VP.
Complements ofWant-Type Verbs

We noted above that one of the striking features of Belfast English was
the appearance of a lexical subject before for in the complements of
want-type verbs, as in (20) and (21), repeated below.
(21) I don' t like the children for to stay out late.
In early approaches to the construction found with want, such as that of

Postal (1974), it was seen as involving subject-to-object raising, with
the subject of the infinitive moving to become the object of the main
clause. This possibility was excluded in subsequent approaches as a
violation of the Projection Principle, but within the Minimalist
approach it is possible once again to think in terms of raising to object;
the object will move to SPEC/AGR0 to check Case. However, this
movement clearly does not take place before spell-out; otherwise the
infinitival subject would raise to a position before the verb in the main
clause.
(61) *I Jimmy wanted (for) to come with me
(62) *I don't the children like (for) to stay out late
Thus, the pre-for position of the subject cannot be the result of move-
ment; there is no reason why the subject should move into the postver-
bal object position, where nothing would be checked. The only move-
ment which should take place is movement to SPEC/AGR0.
As noted in the previous chapter, there is one instance where objects
move in the syntax to SPEC/AGR0P, and that is where the sentence is
imperative and the lexical verb raises to C. Here, an object which is a
weak pronoun moves to SPEC/AGR0. Let us look at what happens
when an infinitival complement is embedded under such a structure.
Verbs of the want class in general are not very felicitous in imperatives,
but contexts can be constructed in which they are possible.
(63) Want you for to win (and you will win).
(64) Expect you for to pass the exam (and you will pass).
Here, where there is a weak pronoun subject in the infinitive, it does
object shift.
(65) Want him you for to win (and he will win).
(66) Expect her you for to pass the exam (and she will pass).
Note that if for were in C here, we would expect such a construction to

be a violation of the COMP-trace effect, since it would contain an overt
complementiser immediately followed by a trace in subject position.
Unless the COMP-trace effect is for some reason restricted to wh-
traces, the fact that it does not hold here suggests that the complemen-
tiser is not in fact in C but has cliticised to to.
The problem remains of how to explain the subject/or to order. One
possibility is that the subject has moved to a position in front of the
complementiser, the SPEC/CP position. This possibility is envisaged
for some languages by Massam (1985). However, though accounting
for the occurrence of a lexical subject before for, it is not clear what
the motivation for such movement would be; moreover, it does not
provide a unified explanation for the facts of infinitives in Belfast Eng-
lish. On the other hand, our claim that for may cliticise to to in that
dialect can handle the facts of infinitives with lexical subjects also, as
follows.
Cliticisation across a subject is permitted. We noted above that for
does not leave a trace after cliticisation, so that it cannot check Case
once it has moved. Thus, cliticisation can only occur where there is
something other than for to check Case; this suggests that want-type
verbs are Exceptional Case-Markers/Checkers, which allow movement
of the subjects of their complements into the matrix SPEC/AGR0P,
movement, which normally occurs after spell-out, with the exception
just outlined in relation to imperatives. Thus where for cliticises, there
is still a Case-checking position available, the AGR0 position of the
next highest clause.
An argument in favour of a cliticisation approach to such structures,
or more precisely in favour of for being in INFL rather than COMP at
S-structure, pointed out by an anonymous National Language and Lin-
guistic Theory reviewer, is from the placement of adverbs. There are
adverbs such as definitely, which can be placed between the subject and
the first occurrence of INFL.
(67) I want the boys definitely to be there.
Such adverbs can only occur before for and never between for and to
(68) a. I want the boys definitely for to be there,
b. *I want the boys for definitely to be there.
If for were in COMP, one would expect (68b) to be grammatical

Exceptional Case-Marking/Checking is impossible, where something

intervenes between the matrix verb and the infinitival subject, and for
must be used, just as in standard English, as shown in (19a), repeated
below
(19a) I want very much for him to get accepted.
Although a ready explanation was available for this in earlier frame-

works, where adjacency was a requirement for Case-assignment, it does
not fall out quite so naturally where Case is checked under SPEC/Head
agreement. It must be that adjacency to want is required to permit dele-
tion of CP, without which subject extraction may be blocked.
Sentences where a want-type verb is followed by for plus a lexical
subject are ungrammatical in Belfast English, as (22), repeated below,
shows
(22) *I wanted for Jimmy to come with me.
It might therefore seem that cliticisation is obligatory after want-type

verbs, whereas all we have said so far implies that cliticisation may but
need not apply. Examination of other varieties of English in the British
Isles, however, indicates that in these also (including standard English)
sentences like (22) are ungrammatical, even though the dialects in ques-
tion are not for to dialects and therefore presumably do not allow for
cliticisation. This suggests that another process is at work here, proba-
bly a rule of/or-deletion in PF as proposed by Chomsky (1981). This
rule is present in certain dialects, but absent in others (some American
dialects for example) in which (22) is grammatical. Note that the exis-
tence of this rule provides additional support for our cliticisation pro-
posal. For in Belfast English for can occur after wanr-type verbs if no
lexical subject is present, as (69) indicates.
(69) I want for to go.
If for were in C here, it would be difficult to explain why for-deletion

was optional here although it is obligatory in (22); however, under our
analysis where for has cliticised to to in (69) and is thus no longer adja-
cent to want, the absence of/br-deletion receives an explanation.
The cliticisation of for also explains why wh-extraction is possible
from a for infinitive after want-type verbs in Belfast English but not in
Standard English, as (70) shows.
(70) BE (*SE) Who do you want for to help you?
The S-structure of this in Standard English would be like (71)

(71) *WhOi do you want Cp[tj for IP[ti to help you]
The ungrammaticality of this in Standard English can be explained natu-

rally if for in C acts to block antecedent government just as that does; this
is then an instance of the COMP-trace effect, parallel to the following.
(72) a. Who do you think will help you?
b. *Who do you think that will help you?
The structure of the (b) example would be the following, with a COMP-
trace sequence just as in (72).
(73) *WhOj do you think CP[ti that IP[ti will help you]
However, in Belfast English, once/or has cliticised, the structure would

be the following
(74) Who do you want CP[ti e IP[ti for to help you]]
Here, for is no longer in C, and antecedent government is therefore not

blocked.
We have shown that want-type verbs check the Case of the infinitival
subject through raising it to SPEC/AGR0 in the matrix clause; this can
apply before spell-out in imperatives, so that movement to the matrix
SPEC/AGR0 can be overtly observed. The cliticisation of for to to in
Belfast English permits the deletion of CP, allowing the subject to
move. It also permits the extraction of wh-elements in subject position
from an infinitival clause containing for, since the cliticisation of for
means that it is not in C to give rise to a COMP/Trace effect.
Raising and ECM Verbs

If we assume that raising and ECM verbs are S'pr (CP) deleting, rather
than being subcategorised for IP complements, then we can explain the
occurrence of for to with them. Since there is no C position at spell-out,
examples like (27b) and (28b) repeated below will be impossible
(27b) *It seems for John to be better
(28b) *I believe for them to have done it
Note that CP-deletion must occur at some point in the derivation after
/br-cliticisation has applied, so that we find examples like (27a) and
(28a) where for has cliticised to to
(21 a) John seems for to be better.
(28a) I believe them for to have done it.
It would thus not seem to be the case that such verbs select IP; rather,
all verbs taking sentential complements select CP, and the deletion of
the CP node is an operation which takes place after certain verbs in the
course of the derivation.
Try-type Verbs
We have argued that several of the properties of Belfast English infini-
tives can be explained if for is a clitic. This accounts for a number of
facts about the dialect. However, it also raises some problems relating
to the subcategorisation of verbs taking infinitives.
One of these relates to the status of the difference between wanf-type
verbs, which can take infinitives with lexical subjects, and try-type
verbs, which cannot. This distinction holds in Belfast E glish, just as in
standard English
In analyses of standard English infinitives (see for example Chomsky
1981), it has often been claimed that the difference between these two
types is that the former take the for complementiser whereas the latter
do not, and thus do not have any means of Case-marking (or in more
recent frameworks, Case-checking) the lexical subject of an embedded
clause, which is therefore excluded. The occurrence of for with try-type
verbs in Belfast English is thus something of a problem. One would
predict that a dialect which allowed for with try would also allow lexi-
cal subjects with try, but as we have seen, that is not the case in Belfast
English. This indicates that the difference between want- and fry-type
verbs cannot lie in the selection of for, and that the difference must be
encoded in the lexicon by other means. One possibility is that that there
is a semantic difference between the two types. Pesetsky (in prepara-
tion), who claims for somewhat different reasons that fry-type verbs
take for, suggests that the difference lies in the fact that fry-type verbs
have agentive subjects whereas wanf-type verbs do not. A problem with
this analysis, however, is that fry can, as we have noted, be followed by
an infinitive with a lexical subject in some dialects, such as Ozark Eng-

lish; unless there is a difference between the semantic role of the subject
with try in Ozark and other varieties, which seems unlikely, the differ-
ence cannot be wholly attributed to the semantics of the verbs con-
cerned.
Thus, in Belfast English at least, the difference between the want-
class and the try-class cannot reduce to subcategorisation for for.
It seems to be the case, rather, that try is not CP-deleting, but it does,
like want, trigger obligatory/or-deletion when for is adjacent to it. Thus
try will be followed by a CP with an empty C slot at spell-out (for hav-
ing either moved or been deleted). Because there is nothing to check the
Case of an overt subject, the subject must be empty.
It is interesting that the for to dialect which allows lexical subjects
after try, Ozark, is also one in which for-deletion does not occur after
want.
(69) I tried for John to go.
(70) I want for John to go.
Belfast English, however, has obligatoryfor-deletion after both these

types. Note that/or-deletion does not necessarily trigger CP deletion;
for can delete while the CP remains.
Thus, to summarise, I am suggesting that verbs which take infinitives
are not distinguished, at least in Belfast English, by whether or not they
may take for. Rather they differ according to whether or not they are
CP-deleting, with believe-type and raising verbs falling into the CP-
deletion class, fry-type verbs into the non-CP-deleting, and want-type
verbs having optional CP-deletion. With want- and try-type verbs, /or-
deletion is obligatory where for is adjacent to the verb at S-structure.
Why Is Complementiser Lowering Possible?

It is often claimed that lowering is impossible in syntax, with only rais-
ing processes being allowed, because a moved element must c-com-
mand its antecedent. Lowering processes, indeed, seem to be rare, and
they create a problem; although we know that the distance an element
moves is restricted in the case of raising by antecedent government
requirements, it is not easy to see how lowering is so restricted, particu-
larly if, s we have argued for for, it deletes at LF and there is therefore
no link to a trace. Yet, clearly, lowering is not unbounded: for can only
lower to the nearest to.
Now, significantly, a number of proposals for lowering have involved
complementisers. As already noted, Shlonsky (1988) argues for comple-
mentiser cliticisation in Hebrew. McCloskey (1992a) argues for the low-
ering of the complementiser to I in Irish; as in Belfast English, comple-
mentisers in Irish show characteristics of being in C and of being in I.
Now complementisers have in common that they are often devoid of
semantic content. Let us suppose that lowering is possible to satisfy a
requirement to cliticise by PF, but will be impossible if a chain is
thereby created which will be ruled out at LF; only if the moved ele-
ment has no semantic contribution, and thus it and its trace are invisible
at LF, will lowering be possible.
As regards bounding, note that a "shortest movement" requirement
(Chomsky 1992), deriving ultimately from some kind of "least effort"
principle, is independent of direction of movement. It is not, as
McCloskey (1992a) notes, necessarily a condition on chains, but rather
a condition on the movement process itself. Thus, lowering will be con-
strained just as raising is, applying in the case of Heads on a head-to-
head basis.
Other for-to Dialects

Other for to dialects appear to differ from Belfast English. The only
other for to dialects on which data is available to me are Ottawa Valley
English and Ozark English; moreover, it is only in the case of the for-
mer that an in-depth study has been done. Data on Ozark are confined to
a limited number of examples in Chomsky & Lasnik (1977), Chomsky
(1981) and Koster and May (1982).
In Ottawa Valley English (Carroll 1983) for to occurs only in the
complements of verbs which in standard English can take for infinitives
with lexical subjects, and which are associated with the preposition for.
Raising and believe-type verbs do not take for to, and lexical subjects
do not appear to the left of for. It therefore does not seem that the use of
for to arises from/or-cliticisation in that dialect.
Carroll argues that the for of these infinitives is not the complemen-
tiser but a preposition. Another possible explanation, suggested by
Chomsky (1981) with respect to Ozark English but which could also
apply to the Ottawa Valley data, is that for is optionally a governor in
some varieties. Carroll notes that this can handle the Ottawa Valley
English data but regards it as unlikely that a relatively conservative
dialect should have acquired a property such as optionality of govern-
ment. Carroll's argument that for has been recategorised as something
other than a complementiser gains some weight from the fact that, in
the wea for to variety of Northern Irish English, which permits for to
only in rpose clauses, something similar seems to have happened; the
for here would seem not to be a complementiser but an item similar to
in order as in in order to.
It seems likely that, as the use of for to dies out, at some point for
becomes recategorised as something other than a complementiser,
which seems to have happened in rather different ways in Ottawa
Valley English and the weak variety of the for to dialect in Northern
Ireland.
This leaves us with Ozark English, where the data is as we have
noted somewhat unclear. Assuming that the paradigm is as reported in
Chomsky & Lasnik (1977), however, it seems that here for to, as in
Ozark, is restricted to cases where "for + lexical subject" is possible
in standard English (and also try, discussed above). The arguments for
Ottawa Valley English may thus apply there also.
In the light of the facts of Belfast English, other for to varieties need
to be re-examined; for example, we would wish to know how the use of
for to interacts with negative placement; however, from the data avail-
able, it seems likely that there is not a unitary for to phenomenon but
rather that this results from different factors in different dialects.
Conclusion
We have seen that Belfast English differs from standard English with
regard to the lexical status of for, in both varieties for is a complemen-
tiser, but only in Belfast English can it be a clitic.
In other for to varieties, the for to phenomenon seems to arise from
other lexical characterisations of for. In the "weak" for to dialect spoken
in Northern Ireland, for is an element similar to in order of in order to;
it is not a complementiser. In Ozark English, for is claimed to be a
preposition. These lexical differences in the status of for, interacting

with the principles of Universal Grammar, give rise to the different pat-
terns of use of for to in different dialects.
As with inverted imperatives, so the pattern of use of for to seems to
be changing, with a shift from the "strong" dialect, where for is a cliti-
cising complementiser, to the "weak" variety, where it is a marker of
purpose clauses, to one which is similar to standard English.
5
Inversion in Embedded
Questions
In English matrix questions, both yes-no and wh, there is subject-auxil-

iary inversion, generally analysed as movement of I (=AGRS) to C.
(1) Is Bill going?

(2) What have they done?
In standard English, this inversion is restricted to matrix questions; it

does not occur in embedded questions, so that (3) and (4) are ungram-
matical.
(3) SE *I wondered was Bill going.
(4) SE *They asked them what had they done.
Rather, forms without inversion must be used. In the case of yes-no

questions, the embedded question is introduced by whether or if.
(5) I wondered whether/if Bill was going.
(6) I asked them what they had done.
However, Belfast English, in common with other Hiberno-English

dialects (see McCloskey 1992b), does allow subject-auxiliary inversion
in embedded questions, in contrast to standard English. Thus in Belfast
English questions like (3) and (4) are entirely grammatical. In this chap-
ter, we consider why such inversion is possible in Belfast English, but
not in standard English.
105
The Facts of Embedded Inversion in Belfast English

Before looking in detail at these structures in Belfast English, we need
to establish that they are cases of true embedded inversion, and not
merely quotations of direct speech, where of course standard English
also allows inversion.
(7) I wondered, "Is Bill going?"
(8) They asked them, "What have you done?"
That Belfast English has true embedded inversion can be seen from
the fact that a direct rendition of the words spoken or thought is not
required. Rather, embedded questions in Belfast English show
"sequence of tenses," as in indirect questions, with a verb spoken in the
present tense changed into the past when it appears embedded under a
past tense verb.
(9) a. She asked, "Are they leaving?"
b. She asked if they were leaving.
c. She asked were they leaving.
Similarly, they allow changes to pronouns

(10) a. Every pregnant woman wonders "Will my baby be all right?"
b. Every pregnant woman wonders will her baby be all right.
(11) a. They asked me, "Have you read War and Peace?"
b. They asked me had / read War and Peace.
Thus, these are true indirect questions and not merely direct quotations.
Inversion in embedded questions is considered by most speakers to
be slightly better with yes-no questions than with wh-questions, and for
a not insubstantial number of speakers, inversion is only grammatical in
embedded yes-no questions. For these speakers, sentences such as
(12)-(15) are ungrammatical.
(12) She asked who had I seen.
(13) They wondered what had John done.
(14) They couldn't understand how had she had time to get her hair done.
(15) He didn't say why had they come.
This suggests that the process of inversion is not triggered in exactly the
same way in the two types of questions; it is possible to have a grammar
which permits inversion in yes-no embedded questions, but not in wh-
ones.
Inversion in Embedded Questions 107
McCloskey (1992b) argues that inversion in embedded questions

occurs only after a subset of verbs in Hiberno-English; in particular, he
suggests that it is unavailable in subject position, and unavailable after
any verbs which do not allow adverbial adjunction to their CP comple-
ments; however, in Belfast English inversion appears to be able to occur
after any verb which takes an interrogative complement, and also in
questions appearing in subject position.
(16) Was he vegetarian was what was puzzling them
(17) Can you get a good job depends on who can help you
(18) Should he go or not was the question he kept asking himself
(19) The police found out had the goods been stolen
(20) We couldn't establish did he meet them.
(21) I know is he going or not, but I'm not letting on.
In (16)-(18) inversion occurs in a clause in subject position. In

(19)-(21), it occurs in complement clauses where adverbial adjunction
to CP is impossible. Thus in the following examples, the adverbial can-
not be interpreted as belonging to the embedded clause; for example,
(22) can only mean that the "finding out" happened last night, not that
the goods were stolen last night.
(22) *The police found out last night had the goods been stolen.
(23) *We couldn't establish last month did he meet them.
(24) *I know tomorrow is he going or not, but I'm not letting on.
In Belfast English, embedded questions may either show inversion,

or be introduced by whether or if as in standard English. However, it is
impossible for both inversion and whether or if to be present.
(25) a. They couldn't work out whether/if we had left
b. They couldn't work out had we left.
c. They couldn't work out whether/if had we left.
(26) a. John asked Mary whether/if she was going to the lecture.
b. John asked Mary was she going to the lecture.
c. *John asked Mary whether/if was she going to the lecture.
Apart from inversion, embedded questions in Belfast English differ

from those in standard English in one other respect; they allow the co-
occurrence of a wh-phrase with the complementizer that.
(27) I wonder which dish that they picked.
(28) They didn't know which model that we had discussed.
However, whether and if never occur in questions containing wh-

phrases
(29) *I wonder which dish whether they picked.
(30) *They didn't know which model if they had discussed.
The occurrence of that with a wh-phrase is restricted to embedded

questions; that never occurs after a wh-word in direct questions.
(31) *Which dish that they picked?
(32) *Which model that they discussed?
Where a wh-word is followed by that, inversion is impossible.

(33) *I wondered which dish that did they pick.
(34) *I wondered which model that they discussed.
Surprisingly, inversion is not restricted in Belfast English to the

clause in which the wh-element occurs at spell-out. Rather, it can also
occur in that-type clauses from which a wh-element has been extracted,
in either matrix or embedded questions.
(35) Who did John hope would he see?
(36) What did Mary claim did they steal?
(37) I wonder what did John think would he get.
This is somewhat surprising since it occurs in clauses embedded under

verbs that do not themselves take [+wh] complements
(38) *John hoped who he could help.
(39) *Mary claimed whether she could understand the book.
As usual the standard English form does not allow inversion in the
embedded clause.
(40) Who did John hope (that) he would see?
(41) What did Mary claim (that) they stole?
Nor does standard English allow a wh-complementiser in such

clauses.
(42) *Who did John hope whether/if he would see?
(43) *What did Mary claim whether/if they stole?
It might be thought that sentences like (35) and (36) are not true
embedded clauses, but rather sentences containing a parenthetical ele-
ment, along the following lines.
(44) Who, did John hope, would he see?

(45) What, did Mary claim, did they steal?
That this is not the case can be shown by the fact that inversion can go
right down a sequence of clauses to the extraction site.
(46) WhOj did John say did Mary claim had
John feared would Bill attack ti?
which is of course quite impossible in standard English.
Note that this type of inversion can cause ambiguity where a verb can
take either a wh- or a that-complement. Thus
(47) Who did John say did Mary meet?
can mean the same as either of the following:
(48) Who did John say whether Mary met?
or
(49) Who did John say that Mary met?
In Belfast English, inversion is, as usual, ungrammatical where an
overt complementiser appears.
(50) a. *Who did John hope that could he help?
b. Who did John hope that he could help?
Summarising, Belfast English allows inversion in embedded ques-
tions, whereas standard English does not. Inversion is impossible with
overt complementisers. For most speakers, inversion is possible in both
yes-no and wh-embedded questions, but for some it only occurs in the
yes-no type.
Where wh-movement occurs out of an embedded clause into the
matrix in a direct question, or into a higher clause in an embedded ques-
tion, inversion can occur, for those speakers allowing inversion in
embedded wh-questions, not only in the main clause but also in every
clause between the moved wh-element and its extraction site.
Why Is Inversion Possible in Belfast English

Embedded Clauses?
Inversion in questions in English has generally been considered to be
movement of the verb from I (=AGRs) to the Complementiser position.
A strong argument for this is the complementary distribution of inver-
sion and complementisers. Thus inversion does not occur where a com-
plementiser is present.
(51) a. Did they read the book?
b. I wonder if they read the book.
c. *I wonder if did they read the book.
The word order in English questions is very similar to that found in
most main clauses in a number of Germanic languages, which are gen-
erally described as "Verb second" (V2) because, in main clauses, the
verb occurs in second position (see, for example, Vikner 1991); this
positioning of the verb is usually analysed as a requirement that the
verb move to C and another element move to the SPEC/CP position. In
general, this "verb second" order is restricted to main clauses; it cannot
occur in subordinate clauses (with some exceptions: for example Yid-
dish which, Diesing (1990) argues, allows embedded V2).
Although all main clauses in German and other V2 languages have
verb-raising to C, this only applies to certain sentence types in English:
questions, and certain sentences with sentence-initial negative-type
adverbs.
(52) Will they win the prize?
(53) Where will they go?
(54) Under no circumstances should they leave.
(55) Never have I heard such a thing.
Rizzi (1991) proposes that English has criterial verb-second; the verb
moves to C only when forced to by certain conditions, including the
Wh-criterion:
(56) a. Each +wh SPEC must have a +wh X°.
b. Each +wh X° must have a +wh SPEC.
(a corresponding NEG-criterion ensures verb-raising with negative
adverbial elements in SPEC/CP).
In English direct questions, the wh-element (if any) moves to
SPEC/CP and the verb moves to C, to satisfy the wh-criterion.
Although in English wh-elements front in embedded clauses, the verb
does not invert with the subject.
(57) a. I wonder where the children are going.
b. SE* I wonder where are the children going.
This might be thought to call the wh-criterion into question. However, it
has been suggested (see Rizzi & Roberts 1989) that there must be a
(phonetically null) complementiser present here, selected by the higher

verb, which satisfies the requirement that a +wh element in SPEC must
have a +wh element in the corresponding X° and vice versa. The pres-
ence of this element must satisfy the wh-criterion, and also, because C
is filled and the wh-criterion satisfied, prevent the movement of a verb
into C. Rizzi and Roberts (1989) suggest that movement to C is blocked
in embedded questions because it would mean different types of ele-
ments occurring in C at different stages of the derivation, a complemen-
tiser at D-structure and the raised verb later, which causes a problem in
relation to the projection principle. However, this is not a strong argu-
ment in a framework such as Chomsky's (1992), where the projection
principle is no longer part of the model, and in any case fails to account
for why inversion should be possible in some dialects such as Belfast
English.
If inversion in questions is a V2 phenomenon, then one might expect
that inversion in embedded questions could be treated in the same way
as inversion (or lack of it) in embedded clauses in the V2 languages.
Now, there have been two main analyses of embedded V2 in the Ger-
manic V2 languages; one, proposed in general for the Scandinavian lan-
guages, sees embedded V2 as an instance of CP recursion, restricted to
certain verbs (see for example Vikner 1991); the other, usually pro-
posed for languages which have generalised V2 in embedded clauses,
such as Yiddish and Icelandic (see, for example, Diesing 1990), sees
embedded V2 as occurring when the verb moves to I (=AGRS) and the
subject remains in a lower projection. Let us consider each of these in
turn as possible explanations for the occurrence of inversion in embed-
ded questions in Belfast English.
Is Embedded Inversion a Case ofCP Recursion?

We first consider the possibility that CP-recursion is involved here, that
is, that the construction contains two complementiser nodes. This is the
analysis adopted by McCloskey (1992b) for Hiberno-English embedded
inversion, and he presents a strong argument in its favour. He argues
that adverbial adjunction can only occur to phrases which are not
selected by a lexical category. Thus, there is adjunction to VP, IP and
unselected (e.g., matrix) CP, but not to NP or to selected (embedded)
CP. However, the CP complements of certain verbs appear to be an
exception to this, in that they behave like unselected CPs in allowing
matrix-like adverbial adjunction. McCloskey shows that it is exactly
those CPs permitting adverbial adjunction that permit inversion in the

variety he is considering.
(58) Ask your father when he gets home does he want his dinner.
(59) I was wondering next Christmas would he come home.
(60) Do you remember when they were in Derry did they live in Rose-
mount?
(61) I've never found out if I'd asked him would he really have come with
me.
On the contrary, in the variety of Hiberno-English which McCloskey

considers, predicates which do not allow adverbial adjunction to their
CP complements, also do not allow inversion in those complements.
(62)HE a. *The police couldn't establish while we were out who had broken
into our apartment.
b. *The police couldn't establish who had they beaten up
(63)HE a. *While you're out how many people you meet depends on where
you go.
b. *How many people do you meet depends on where you go.
McCloskey proposes that both the possibility of adverbial adjunction to

CP and the possibility of embedded inversion result from the same phe-
nomenon—that some verbs select complementisers which themselves
can take a CP complement; the complement found with such verbs
would therefore look like (64).
This means that the lower CP is not directly selected by a lexical cate-
gory, and thus behaves like an unselected CP in relation to adjunction
and also inversion; matrix (=unselected) CPs in standard English and

Hiberno-English freely allow adverbial adjunction and inversion.
(65) While you were out how many people did you meet?
McCloskey does not consider precisely what is the difference

between standard English and Hiberno-English that means that embed-
ded inversion is not available in the former but is available in the latter.
Clearly, since both varieties permit adverbial adjunction to the same set
of complements, one would expect both to permit inversion also; but
standard English does not.
Moreover, McCloskey's observations do not hold for Belfast Eng-
lish; although in the variety of Hiberno-English he describes, inversion
can only occur with unselected CPs, it is not, as we noted above, so
restricted in Belfast English, where (62b) and (63b) above are grammat-
ical even though adverbial adjunction with the same predicates is
impossible, so that (62a) and (63a) are ungrammatical: there is not thus
a clear link in Belfast English between the availability of adverbial
adjunction and that of embedded inversion; the former is restricted to
certain CPs, whereas the latter appears rather freely in embedded ques-
tions regardless of the embedding predicate.
There are a number of other problems with a CP recursion analysis.
First, it allows for two complementiser positions. This is necessary for the
V2 languages, and indeed as we shall see for some aspects of English,
because there it is indeed possible to have a complementiser followed by
embedded V2. Thus in English, where embedded inversion is available
for many speakers when triggered by the MEG criterion, an overt comple-
mentiser precedes the inversion trigger and the inverted verb.
(66) a. He said that never would he do such a thing,
b. He said never would he do such a thing.
Similarly, the V2 languages which allow embedded V2 in certain

contexts can have it following a complementiser, as in the following
Danish example from Vikner (1991:100).
(67) Hunsagdeat vi skulle 11 ikke t kobe denne bog.
She said that we should not buy this book.
However, one of the characteristics of inversion in Belfast English
questions is that it never co-occurs with a complementiser; examples
where inversion follows a complementiser are strongly ungrammatical.
(68) a. *I wondered if had they read the book.

b. I wondered if they had read the book.
c. I wondered had they read the book.
(69) a. They asked who if did we see.
b. They asked who did we see.
c. They asked who we saw.
The presence of a C position, separate from the C position to which

the verb moves, means that the incompatibility of inversion with com-
plementisers in indirect questions cannot be explained as a consequence
of the general prohibition on the co-occurrence of complementisers
with V2. It might be possible to work out some solution to this, for
example claiming that the only complementiser which allows an "unse-
lected" CP to follow it is the null complementiser in English. But note
that this only applies to questions, since in the other main case of
embedded inversion, that is, with the NEG criterion, a complementiser,
that, is not only possible but preferred, as noted above. Moreover, there
will be problems in explaining the unavailability of inversion with a
complementiser in sentences such as (70a), where the complementiser
which blocks inversion is not in fact a wh-complementiser but rather
that, a complementiser which allows embedded V2 arising from the
NEG criterion.
(70) a. *Who did John claim that did he see?
b. Who did John claim did he see?
c. Who did John claim that he saw?
Compare (71):
(71) John claimed that under no circumstance would he do such a thing
Thus, it seems that even verbs which permit CP recursion in both

Belfast English and standard English do not allow embedded inversion
in questions where there is an overt complementiser present. Although
embedded inversion triggered by the NEG criterion requires or at least
prefers the presence of an overt complementiser, sentences including
embedded interrogative inversion are strongly ungrammatical where a
complementiser is included. This, together with the fact that both stan-
dard English and Belfast English permit embedded inversion of the
NEG-criterion type, but only Belfast English permits inversion in
embedded questions, suggests that we are dealing with two different
phenomena here, and that inversion in embedded questions does not
arise from the same source as does the CP-recursion type inversion
found in the NEG-criterion examples.
Finally, note that a CP recursion analysis would predict that there
should be no difference in status between yes-no and wh-embedded ques-
tions in relation to inversion; if embedded CPs behave exactly like unse-
lected, matrix CPs, then inversion in both types should be equally possi-
ble. However, as observed above, many speakers find inversion better in
the yes-no type, and for some it is completely unavailable in the wh-type.
It thus seems that there are a number of arguments against considering
embedded inversion in Belfast English as deriving from CP-recursion.
Is the Verb in AGRS and the Subject in SPEC/TP?

Could embedded inversion in Belfast English questions then be an
instance of a structure where the verb occurs in AGRS and the subject in
a lower projection, for example SPEC/TP, similar to the analysis sug-
gested by Diesing (1990) for Yiddish?
Superficially, such an explanation is attractive; it ties the availability
of inversion in Belfast English (but not in standard English) to a differ-
ence between the two which we have already established—the avail-
ability of SPEC/TP as a possible subject position in Belfast English.
Under this analysis, embedded inversion would be possible because,
although the C position was filled by a complementiser, apparent inver-
sion could occur through movement of the verb to AGRS, but the sub-
ject only as far as SPEC/TP.
Again, however, this analysis has a number of problems in relation to
the Belfast English facts. First, like the CP-recursion analysis, it pre-
dicts the availability of inversion with overt complementisers, for there
is a Complementiser position which occurs above the position to which
the verb moves for V2, in this case AGRS. This is possible in Yiddish,
as shown in the following example:
(72) Avrom gloybt az Max shikti avek vi dos bakh
Avrom believes that Max sends away the book
On the contrary, as noted above, inversion is ungrammatical with

overt complementisers in Belfast English, contrary to the predictions of
the V-in-AGRs analysis.
Moreover, there are problems in relation to Case facts. We noted in
Chapter 2 that the subject and verb in Belfast English could occur in
Tense, rather than AGRS and in that case there was no agreement
between the subject and the verb. It was shown that where the subject
occurred in SPEC/Tense, it could not be a nominative pronoun; we
argued that this was so because in the SPEC/Tense position only default
Case could be checked.
(73) They is going.
(74) *We has read the book.
Now, if Rizzi's (1991) Wh-criterion is along the right lines, then in

wh-questions, where the verb is in AGRS, the wh-element must be in
SPEC/AGRSP, thus precluding the possibility of subject-checking
in that position even at LF. There is thus no possibility, even at LF, of
checking a nominative pronoun, and, as with other instances where the
subject occurs in SPEC/TP, nominative Case-marked elements should
be impossible. But this is not so; nominative pronouns occur quite
freely in inverted embedded wh-questions.
(75) I wondered where were they going.
(76) I asked what had she done.
It is also worth noting that singular concord does not by any means
necessarily co-occur with embedded inversion in the grammars of
speakers. Almost all Hiberno-English speakers use embedded inver-
sion, and it is certainly in very widespread use in Belfast among speak-
ers of all classes, having the status of a local standard form; in fact most
speakers are not aware that it does not occur in standard English. How-
ever, it is only in certain areas (including Belfast) that singular concord
is used, and even there it tends to be absent from the usage of educated
middle-class speakers. There are thus very many speakers who do not
have grammars which admit the occurrence of an NP in the SPEC/TP
position in singular concord, but nevertheless have embedded inversion
in questions. Therefore, it does not seem likely that the availability of
embedded inversion is a consequence of the same parameter setting
(availability of TP as a subject-checking position) as singular concord.
An Alternative Analysis
Yes-No Questions
What we propose here is that there is in fact only one complementiser
position, in embedded questions in English, to which the verb moves in
Belfast English, but not standard English, before spell-out. In Belfast
English, there must be a phonologically null complementiser available

in embedded clauses which requires to be checked and triggers raising
in the overt syntax, whereas in standard English the only available com-
plementisers in embedded clauses are if and possibly whether (which as
noted in the previous chapter may be a wh-operator). In standard Eng-
lish, the fact that the C position is filled by an overt element which is
not an affix means that raising in the syntax is blocked in embedded
questions. On the other hand, the availability of an affix-type null wh-
complementiser triggers raising to C in Belfast English.
Law (1991) argues that complementisers are expletives which require
to be replaced at LF, so that the verb will always raise to C at LF; the dif-
ference between Belfast English and standard English, in relation to
inversion in embedded yes-no questions, then, reduces to the stage at
which inversion takes place: in the syntax in Belfast English, and at LF,
replacing the overt complementiser, in standard English. Note that in
Belfast English the null wh-complementiser must have a strong V-fea-
ture, for where a phonologically null complementiser is chosen, raising to
C is obligatory. Either an overt complementiser or inversion must occur
in embedded questions; it is not possible to have neither; that is, if a null
complementiser is chosen, raising to C before spell-out is obligatory.
(77) a. I asked whether/if they were leaving.
b. I asked were they leaving.
c. *I asked they were leaving.
(78) a. John wondered whether/if Bill had got the letter.
b. John wondered had Bill got the letter.
c. *John wondered Bill had got the letter.1
Since in both Belfast English and standard English we find obligatory
inversion in matrix questions, we must assume that the +wh-comple-
mentiser which introduces matrix questions is, in both varieties, an ele-
ment which is strong, forcing raising; it is only in relation to the com-
plementiser found in embedded questions that the difference arises.
Here, it is only in Belfast English that the same complementiser which
appears in matrix questions is available; in standard English, a different
complementiser must be used.
Wh-Questions
The fact that for some speakers, embedded inversion is only possible in
yes-no questions but not in wh-questions, suggests that there is a differ-
ent process involved here.
What the Belfast English facts suggest is that the trigger for verb
movement in embedded wh-questions is the presence of a [+wh] C, cre-
ated by agreement with a wh-element in SPEC/CP. This agreement
seems to fail in embedded questions in standard English, but to be oper-
ative in Belfast English. Further evidence for agreement in the overt
syntax in Belfast English comes from examples like (79)
(79) Who did you claim did he see?
Here, there is a trace of the wh-word in the specifier position of the

embedded SPEC/CP.
(80) WhOj did you claim t1i did he see t2i
In Belfast English, the verb can raise, provided C is not overtly filled,
but in standard English it may not. Now, the complementiser here must
initially be a [—wh] one, since claim does not subcategorise for [+wh]
complements.
(81) *They claimed if we won.
(82) *We claimed what we did.
And where an overt complementiser shows up, it is always that rather
than an interrogative complementiser.
(83) Who did you claim that/*if we saw?
But in Belfast English, the verb, which we have claimed to raise to +wh
complementisers, can raise here. How is this possible? It appears that
agreement takes place between the wh-element and the complemen-
tiser; and that agreement takes place in the overt syntax in Belfast Eng-
lish, but not until LF in standard English. There is thus a +wh-C in the
overt syntax in Belfast English, forcing the verb to move to C before
spell-out, but in standard English the complementiser remains [—wh]
until LF, and movement of the verb therefore does not happen until
after spell-out.
Notice that we cannot account for the inversion by requiring that all
CPs in a sentence which is a question contain inversion; the inversion
cannot go lower than the clause from which the wh-element is
extracted.
(84) a. *Who do you think did John convince did Mary go?
b. Who do you think did John convince that Mary went?
Thus, it seems that inversion is triggered only where, under a successive

cyclic movement analysis of wh-movement, we would expect to find a
wh-trace in SPEC/CP.
The Belfast English facts here are reminiscent of a phenomenenon
occurring in Irish which is discussed by McCloskey (1979, 1985,
1990). In Irish, clauses from which a wh-element has been extracted
can have the special interrogative/relative complementiser aL, rather
than the neutral complementiser goN, and this applies to all COMP
positions occurring between the surface position of the wh-element
and the extraction site. The following examples are from McCloskey
(1979).
(85) 3. Ce aL deir siad aL chum t-amhran sin

Who COMP say they COMP composed that song
'Who do they say wrote that song?'
b. Deir siad gurL chum se an t-amhran sin
COMP he
'They say that he wrote that song'
(86) a. An bhfuil fhios agat caide aL ba
Do you know what COMP
mhaith liom aL dheanfadh Eithne
I would like COMP would do Eithne
'Do you know what I would like Eithne to do?'
b. Ba mhaith liom goN ndeanfadh Eithne e
COMP it
'I would like Eithne to do it'
Here, a complementiser position which would normally be filled by a

[—wh] complementiser, as shown in the (b) examples, becomes a spe-
cial [+wh] complementiser when it heads a clause from which wh-
movement has taken place. This can be seen as agreement taking place
in the syntax between the wh-trace in SPEC/CP and the complemen-
tiser.
In Belfast English, what happens is not that a special complementiser
occurs, as in Irish, but that the [+wh] complementiser created after
agreement attracts movement of the verb to C, but the phenomenon
would appear to be underlyingly similar, involving agreement of the
complementiser with the wh-trace appearing in SPEC/CP.
If our analysis of Belfast English is correct here, then it is very clear
evidence that successive cyclic movement of the wh-phrase has taken

place, because there must be wh-traces in each SPEC/CP to trigger
movement of the verb to C. Note that these wh-traces must be present
before spell-out, because I-to-C movement happens before spell-out.
Thus, it is clear not only that wh-movement must be successive cyclic,
but that the wh-traces must be present in the syntax, excluding any
model which might, for example, generate the wh-element in SPEC/CP,
and form the chain necessary for its linking to the "extraction" site at
LF. We also have, at least for Belfast English, a diagnostic for the
appearance of wh-traces.
Not all wh-traces trigger inversion; only those whose antecedent is a
question word do; thus inversion does not occur in clauses from which
extraction of a wh-relative pronoun occurs.
(87) a. *This is the man who John claimed did I see

b. This is the man who John claimed that I saw
Thus, the traces which trigger inversion must be identifiable as traces

of wh-question words; arguing perhaps for a "full copy" rather than a
"trace" version of movement. At the very least, the traces must have
their interrogative status indicated.
Notice that if what we are saying here is correct, the wh-criterion
must in fact be a facet of LF rather than S-structure. For we have argued
that in standard English, the reason the verb does not raise to C in
embedded wh-questions is that C is filled by a non-wh-complementiser,
which does not get its +wh features until LF, where agreement occurs.
This means that in standard English, the wh-criterion is not met in
embedded questions until LF. If the wh-criterion can be formulated as
an LF condition, then this is a further move towards having all condi-
tions as interface conditions, applying at LF or PF, as envisaged in the
Minimalist program (Chomsky 1992).
The possibility of the satisfaction of the wh-criterion being postponed
until LF receives some confirmation from the occurrence of wh-words
with overt non-wh-complementisers in a number of languages, includ-
ing Belfast English. As we noted above, that, which is inherently a non-
wh-complementiser, can co-occur with wh-words in embedded ques-
tions in Belfast English.2
(88) *I wonder which theory that makes the best predictions

(89) They asked which book that I had chosen
Belfast English is by no means alone in this. In a number of other

languages, where a wh-word and an overt complementiser can co-occur
in embedded wh-questions, with an overt complementiser, the comple-
mentiser which shows up is not, as would be expected from the wh-cri-
terion, a wh-complementiser, but a non-wh-complementiser, as shown
in the following examples from Vikner (1991:62)
(90) Ba. I woaB ned wann daft da Xavea kummt

I know not when that the Xaver comes
(from Bayer (1984b:24, (3a))
(91) SG. I ha-n-im gseit, wie dass er daas sou mache.

I have-him told how that he this should do
(from Penner & Bader 1990:6 (15b))
(92) Fl. Ik weet nie wie dat Jan gezien heeft
I know not who that Jan seen has
(from Haegeman (1991:349, [16b])
(93) MDa. I vide aldri naar at fremmede fiender

You know(pl) never when that foreign enemies
offuerf'alde oss
attack (pi) us
(Peder Palladius, b 1503, cited in Mikkelsen (1911:504))
Noting that this is a potential problem for the wh-criterion, Vikner

suggests that the complementisers must be considered in this case to be
[+wh], even though they are usually [-wh]. While this technically pre-
vents such cases from being a counter-example to the wh-criterion,
there appear to be no independent arguments for it, and it is surprising
that in a variety of different languages this apparent violation of the wh-
criterion shows up. This must call into question the wh-criterion as an
S-structure condition as it stands.
It remains to explain why, in both standard English and Belfast Eng-
lish, I-to-C movement is obligatory in matrix questions. In yes-no ques-
tions, we have argued that a (strong) wh-complementiser occurs in
matrix questions in both varieties, forcing movement to C. However, we
have not accounted for why movement is necessary in wh-questiorns.
Clearly, if agreement between SPEC/CP and the complementiser posi-
tion does not occur until LF in standard English, then it will not be able
to force movement to C in direct questions. Nor can we require matrix

questions to have a strong [+wh] C independent of agreement, because
this would force movement of the verb to C even where the wh-element
is in subject position, and such movement is ungrammatical.
(94) a. *Is who going
Who is going
(95) b. *Did who leave?
Who left?
It must be the case, then, that there is a difference in structure

between matrix and subordinate clauses which forces movement in the
former but not the latter in standard English. This difference is likely to
rest in the nature of the C position. The C position in matrix clauses is
never overtly filled in English questions, whereas complementisers in
subordinate clauses often contain lexical material. It is thus likely that
the C position can be generated empty in matrix clauses, whereas in
subordinate clauses it must be filled. This may make a difference to the
manner in which C in a wh-question acquires its wh-feature. In matrix
clauses, the feature will be copied to an empty node. In embedded ques-
tions, it will be copied to a null complementiser. The former process
may occur in the syntax, indeed very possibly must occur to create the
node in the first place; the latter may occur in the syntax (as in Belfast
English) or at LF (in either variety).
There is other evidence of agreement occurring, or being checked, in
the syntax in Belfast English, but at LF in standard English, in the
agreement patterns found with the expletive there. In standard English,
a verb with existential there agrees with the NP, which will replace the
expletive at LF.
(96) There are books on the table.
(97) There were some students looking for you.
On the other hand in Belfast English, agreement is with the expletive;
that is, it is with the syntactic rather than the LF subject.
(98) There is books on the table.
(99) There was some students looking for you.
If agreement is determined/checked in the syntax in Belfast English,

then there will be a singular verb agreeing with the expletive; if at LF, a
singular verb will clash in features with a plural subject which replaces
the expletive, making sentences like (96) and (97) ungrammatical, as in

standard English. There is thus some evidence that the syntax/LF dis-
tinction in agreement is not restricted to agreement between SPEC/CP
and C, but also applies to other nodes.
Conclusion
We have argued that inversion in Belfast English embedded ques-

tions was not explained by the proposals made in relation to embedded
Verb-second in other languages. Rather, we argued, it derived from two
sources. First, Belfast English has a null interrogative complementiser
with a strong V-feature which can occur in embedded contexts; in stan-
dard English this complementiser is restricted to root contexts.
Second, where there is a wh-element in SPEC/CP, whether overt or a
trace, it makes C [+wh] through spec-head agreement, and this process
occurs before spell-out in Belfast English, thus forcing the verb to move
to C in the syntax, but at LF in standard English, so that there is no
overt movement to C.
6
Subject Contact Relatives
Belfast English allows what have been termed by Doherty (1993) "sub-
ject contact relatives." These are what appear to be relative clauses
where the relativised element is a subject, and where the relative pro-
noun is not phonetically realised.
(1) I have a sister lives in Dublin.
(2) There are people don't read books.
(3) It's always me pays the gas bill.
In standard English, a zero relative pronoun is possible only where

the relativised element is not the subject of its clause. Thus, while the
three sentences above are ungrammatical in standard English, the fol-
lowing are wholly grammatical.
(4) I read a book the teacher recommended.
(5) There are some students I haven't met yet.
(6) This is the pen I wrote the letter with.
Where the subject is relativised in standard English, an overt relative

pronoun or complementiser must be used.
(7) I have a sister who/that lives in Dublin.
(8) There are people who/that don't read books.
(9) It's always me who/that pays the gas bill.
It will be argued here that sentences with subject gaps are not true rela-
tive clauses, but a different type of structure with the head noun being a
kind of topic; the availability of these structures in Belfast English will be
attributed to the strongly topic-prominent nature of that dialect.
124
Subject Contact Relatives 125
Before presenting the arguments for this, however, we need to look

in some detail at the nature of these structures in Belfast English.
Defining Subject Contact Relatives
It is not simply the case that where a subject is relativised, Belfast Eng-
lish always allows a null subject. In fact in the majority of cases, an
overt relative pronoun or complementiser is required when the subject
is relativised, just as in standard English.
(10) *They were looking for the girl had won the prize.
(11) *The students have an exam next week are working very hard.
(12) *I lost the book gives an account of this.
Only head nouns in certain types of main clauses take null subject sub-
ordinate clauses. According to Doherty (1993), this class includes sen-
tences with existential there:
(13) There is/are some students never do any work.
(14) There's a short-cut takes you to the shops.
It also includes it-clefts
(15) It was John told us about it.

(16) It was one of my friends won the prize.
and sentences with the copula

(17) John is the person could help you with that.
(18) He's the one stole the money.
Subject contact relatives also occur after clauses containing verbs

which introduce individuals into the discourse, such as meet, know, and
Invent.
(19) I met a man can speak five languages.
(20) I know a boy has never worked.
(21) They've invented a drug can help jet lag.
It is rather surprising that the occurrence of this type of clause seems to

be dependent, not on the type of head noun, but rather on the type of clause
in which that head noun occurs. In general relative clauses, including those
without overt relative pronouns, occur rather freely with nouns in all kinds
of positions, and in clauses of any type. Thus we find that relative clauses
where the relativised element is not a subject occur in a wide variety of

contexts, including many where subject contact relatives are impossible.
(22) a. The students they chose had the highest marks.
b. *The students won the prize had the highest marks.
(23) a. I fed the dog the postman was afraid of.
b. *I fed the dog bit the postman.
(24) a. They went with friends they had met at college,
b. *They went with friends were studying French.
Thus the occurrence of subject contact relatives seems to be constrained

in ways which are unusual for relative clauses, even those with null rel-
ative pronouns.
It is, in fact, very difficult to characterise syntactically the class of
contexts in which subject contact relative clauses are possible. Thus, for
example, we find contrasts like the following, where a subject contact
relative is acceptable if the head noun occurs in a matrix question, but
not where it occurs in the corresponding statement.
(25) Did I tell you about my sister won first prize last week.
(26) *I told you about my sister won first prize last week.
What these contexts appear to have in common is not the nature of the
head noun or the syntax of the clause in which it occurs. Rather, it is a
discourse factor they have in common: the matrix clause introduces a
new individual into the discourse, and the following clause states some-
thing about that individual.
In all those cases where subject contact relative clauses are possible,
there is an alternative with an overt pronoun.
(27) There's one woman in our street she went to Spain last year.
(28) I have one student he speaks four languages.
Note that these are not two sentences simply placed side by side; the
meaning is not the same as with separate sentences.
(29) There's one woman in our street. She went to Spain last year.
must mean that there is one, and only one, woman who lives in the
street, and that woman went to Spain last year. However, the reading
where the clauses form a single sentence is the same as that of the stan-
dard English; that is:
(30) There is one woman in our street who went to Spain last year.
which does not imply anything about the total number of women who
live in the street, but only says that the total of whom it is true that they
both live in the street and went to Spain last year is one.
Such "resumptive pronouns" only ever occur in subject contact rela-
tives; as in standard English, they do not occur generally in relative
clauses.
(31) *Fm looking for the book (that/which) you recommended it.
(32) *John married the girl (thatAvho(m)) he met her on holiday.
(33) *I was talking to the lecturer (that/who) she takes the linguistics
course.
(34) *The students (who/that) they are taking French have an exam this
week.
Moreover, there are contexts where constructions which look similar

to subject contact relatives occur in cases where relative clauses are not
possible in standard English.
(35) a. He was lucky didn't get caught.
b. *He was lucky who didn't get caught.
(36) a. The children were as well took their chance when they got it.
b. The children were as well who took their chance when they got it.
There is a rather archaic interpretation of (35a) in which it is grammati-

cal, with a reading like:
(37) The one who didn't get caught was lucky.
However, this is not its meaning in Belfast English. It means something

like:
(38) He was lucky, in that he didn't get caught.
Here, we appear to have null subjects in finite clauses, something

which is not normally possible in Belfast English, which is, like stan-
dard English, a non-pro-drop language; finite verbs require overt sub-
jects.
(39) a. They went home,
b. *Went home.
(40) a. He was lucky he got out.
b. *He was lucky got out.
It has been observed that even in non-pro-drop languages such as

English, it is generally possible to omit the subject in matrix clauses in
conversational use, a phenomenon sometimes termed "root null sub-

jects." Thus, sentences like (39b) are used in informal speech. What
never happens in standard English, though, is that a subordinate clause
subject gets omitted. Thus, even in informal contexts, a sentence like
(40b) is ungrammatical. On the contrary, in Belfast English it does
appear to be possible in some cases to have a null subject in a subordi-
nate clause; thus, (40b) is grammatical in Belfast English.
Belfast English is a non-pro-drop language, just as standard English
is; it is not possible in general to omit subjects. Expletives are never
null, and weather verbs always have subjects.
(41) a. There are books on the table,
b. *Are books on the table,
(42) a. It is likely that they will go.
b. *Is likely that they will go.
In this it is unlike the pro-drop languages, such as Italian, which

freely omit subjects and have null expletives and null subjects for
weather verbs (see for example Rizzi 1982,1986; Jaeggli & Safir 1989).
Pro-drop languages also allow apparent violations of the thai-trace
filter; again, this is ungrammatical in Belfast English, as it is in standard
English.
(43) a. *Who do you think that left?
b. Who do you think left?
Thus, apart from embedded null subjects, Belfast English does not
appear to have any other characteristics of pro-drop languages; there-
fore, the embedded null subject phenomenon does not arise because
Belfast English is a pro-drop language.
Embedded null subjects do not occur in all types of finite subordinate
clauses. For example, they do not occur in adverbial clauses
(44) *He ate his dinner after got home.
(45) *When arrived it was raining.
They appear to be restricted to contexts where they are explaining the

meaning of an adjectival element in the first clause.
(46) Mary was lucky got picked for the team.
(47) John was unlucky got caught.
(48) Mary was as well took the other job.
It might seem that these are that-clauses; indeed there are possible alter-
natives with that in the cases of (46) and (47).
(48) Mary was lucky that she got picked for the team.
(49) John was unlucky that he got caught.
But with "as well," a that clause cannot occur; only an infinitive is pos-
sible
(50) *Mary was as well that she took the other job.
(51) Mary was as well to take the other job.
Only where there is no overt complementiser present can the subject

be omitted.
(52) *Mary was lucky that got picked for the team.
(53) *John was unlucky that got caught.
However, it is only after adjectival-type constructions like this that null

subjects are permitted in subordinate clauses. Most that-clauses do not
permit null subjects.
(54) *Mary forgot was supposed to go.
(55) *Bill said wanted to win the prize.
It might seem that examples like (35a) and (36a) (repeated below) are
examples of raising structures where raising has taken place out of a
tensed clause, since there are somewhat equivalent sentences with an
expletive in subject position, as in (56) and (57).
(35) a. He was lucky didn't get caught.
(36) a. The children were as well took their chance when they got it.
(56) It was lucky that he didn't get caught.
(57) It was as well that the children took their chance when they got it.
However, null subject tensed clauses are not generally possible with
raising verbs.
(58) *John is likely will win.
(59) *The children seemed enjoyed the film.
Note that only the subject can be null; null objects are not permitted.
(60) *He was lucky Bill didn't catch.
(61) * John was unlucky Mary spotted.
(62) *Mary was as well Jill chose.
In fact, null subjects in finite subordinate clauses seem to be

restricted to occurring after adjectival-type expressions, and they serve
to clarify the meaning of the element after which they occur.
(63) Mary was lucky IN THAT she got picked for the team.
(64) John was unlucky IN THAT he got caught.
(65) The children were as well IN THAT they took their chance when they
got it.
Thus, Belfast English differs from standard English, not only in

apparently allowing subject contact relative clauses to occur in certain
contexts but also in allowing null subjects in certain types of subordi-
nate clauses. It will be argued below that these are in fact structures of a
similar type.
Analysis of Subject Contact Relatives
Doherty 's analysis

Null subject subordinate clauses have not received a great deal of attention
within the generative tradition, but Doherty (1993) has considered them in
some detail. Doherty argues that these clauses are relative clauses, which
he terms "subject contact relatives." He argues that their structure is identi-
cal to that of object contact relatives, although their distribution is more
restricted. He proposes that both of these types of clauses are IPs rather
than CPs, and therefore do not involve movement of an element to
SPEC/CP, as do relative clauses with overt relative pronouns. Rather, they
have null pronominals in the relativisation site, which are licensed by bind-
ing from the head NP. Doherty argues that the restricted distribution of
subject contact relatives derives from the general restriction on the occur-
rence of resumptive pronouns in the highest subject position; to escape this
restriction, the subject pronouns must be bound by a non-referential NP,
hence the restriction of the construction to a subclass of head nouns, a class
which Doherty claims is defined as being non-referential.
There are a number of problems with this analysis. First, it is not
clear why, if the availability of subject contact relatives derives from
general syntactic principles, they are not available in standard English.
According to Doherty's analysis, standard English does have IP-rela-
tives, in that it has object contact relatives. It is therefore unclear why it
should not have subject contact relatives in the same circumstances as

Hiberno-English dialects, for the zero subject relatives he considers do
not seem to be widely acceptable to standard English speakers.
Second, as he notes himself, the generalisation that non-referential NPs
may take subject contact relatives does not seem wholly correct. As
Doherty notes, although negation licenses indefinites with non-referential
readings, such non-referential NPs cannot head subject contact clauses
(66) *I haven't got a book explains it.
In fact, this is much better without the negative
(67) I've got a book explains it.
If subject contact clauses contain resumptive pronouns, then one
would expect these pronouns to licence island violations, as do resump-
tive pronouns in general. But this is not the case; they are subject to
island conditions
(68) *There's a man I know the book (which)wrote.
Moreover, if these clauses are relative clauses, then it is extremely
surprising that they allow overt resumptive pronouns in subject posi-
tion, as we saw that they do. One of the most robust findings about
resumptive pronouns, cross-linguistically, is that they cannot occur in
the highest subject position, a constraint McCloskey (1990) refers to as
the Highest Subject Restriction. Therefore it seems unlikely that a lan-
guage which uses resumptive pronouns only in a particular type of rela-
tive clause would use them in a position in which they are generally
unavailable in other languages.
Subject Contact Relatives as Matrix Clauses

Although relative clauses do not allow resumptive pronouns in subject
position, topic structures do allow such pronouns coreferential with the
topic
(69) a. John, he doesn't like coffee.
b. See John, he doesn't like coffee.
Sociolinguistic studies of Belfast English (for example, Finlay 1988)
have remarked on the strong tendency to use a topic/comment structure,
in which the topic is overtly introduced, often by see or you know.
(70) See my brother, he never stops talking.

(71) You know my friend Jane, she can't stand coffee.
(72) Have you met our Linda, she's getting married this year.
(73) See anybody with those skills, they can always get a job.
These structures resemble sentences with so-called subject contact rela-

tives in a number of ways. First, they permit either a gap or a pronoun
in a subject position coreferential with the topic.
(74) a. You know John, he never shuts his bake.
mouth
b. You know John, never shuts his bake.
(75) a. See my sister, she always wants anything going,
b. See my sister, always wants anything going.
Where the topic is a non-subject, a gap is impossible and a pronoun

must be used.
(76) a. You know John, 1 can't stand him.
b. *You know John, I can't stand.
Second, they are similar semantically in that they they establish a new
topic in the discourse and then make a comment about it.
Third, there is no obligatory gap in the comment, something which is
also possible in contact-relative-like structures.
(77) a. See the house across the road they never go out.
b. There's a house across the road they never go out.
(78) a. You know our big window the curtains wouldn't pull,
b. We have one big window the curtains wouldn't pull
The syntactic and semantic similarities suggest that the structures in

question may be topic-type structures rather than relatives. The question
is what difference is there in structure between these sentences which
permits null subjects in topic structures, but does not allow null relative
pronouns in relative clauses.
The difference appears to be that in a topic structure, the "comment"
clause acts like a root sentence, with only a requirement of a vague
aboutness relation between topic and comment. In contrast, a relative
clause is a true embedded sentence. The "root" nature of comment
clauses can be seen from the fact that phenomena normally restricted to
root clauses can occur in them. Thus, imperatives, a strictly root phe-
nomenon, occur in comment clauses.
(79) You know your sister, tell her to come and see me.
(80) See you, get that finished at once.
Similarly, inversion occurs as freely in such clauses as it does in matrix

sentences.
(81) There's one office, never have I seen anywhere so messy.
(82) You know your sister, what would she like to do?
Inversion in questions in these structures is grammatical even for those

speakers who do not have inversion in embedded wh-questions (see
Chapter 5). Thus, these topic-type structures have comment clauses
which are essentially root in character.
Whereas see and you know introduce definite topics, there is and the
other structures which introduce null subject subordinate clauses intro-
duce indefinites into the discourse.
That this analysis is along the right lines is suggested by the fact that
a similar structure occurs in Chinese, which is also, as Huang (1984)
notes, a "topic-prominent" language, and this structure is clearly differ-
entiated from relative clauses. In Chinese, relative clauses are pre-nomi-
nal (see Henry 1988):
(83) Wo renshi [ta fudao ] de xuesheng.
I know he coach subordinator student
'I know the student he coached.'
(84) Mei you shuo Hanyu de ren.

Not have speak Chinese subordinator person
'There is nobody who speaks Chinese.'
However, there is another type of clause, termed by Li & Thomp-

son (1981) the Realis Descriptive Clause, which occurs in presenta-
tional contexts, exactly as does the Belfast English subject contact
relative type; and unlike relative clauses in that language, it is post-
nominal.
(85) Wo you yige meimei [xuexi Yingguohua]
I have a sister studies English
'I have a sister is studying English.'
(86) Youde ren [bu xihuan Zhangsan]

There are people not like Zhangsan
'There are people don't like Zhangsan.'
These structures in Chinese cannot be relatives of the normal type, since

the word order is quite different; they have the word order, rather, of
topic-comment structures.
Notice that null subjects in topic structures are not necessarily coref-
erential with an element of the topic:
(87) See Mary, (I) can't stand her perfume
(88) You know Bill, (you) couldn't find him on a Friday afternoon if you
tried.
Thus, the null subject here does not seem to be a variable, but rather a
pronominal which may, like other pronominals, happen to be coindexed
with an element outside its clause. Therefore, unlike relative clauses,
which require a bound variable, topic structures do not seem to. The
null subject here seems to be of the type of the "root null subject" found
in languages which are not pro-drop (Rizzi 1991). Note that, like this
element, the null subject cannot occur in clauses lower than the highest
clause of the comment.
(89) a. See John, never helps his mother.
b. *See John, I know never helps his mother.
(90) a. You know your sister, sent me a postcard from her holiday.
b. *You know your sister, I hope sent me a postcard from her holiday
Thus, we claim that the so-called subject contact relatives are in fact
root-type clauses, able like roots to have null subjects. The null element
in subject position may (but need not necessarily) be coreferential with
an element in the topic, just as any pronominal may be coreferential
with another outside its clause.
Although in general the comment is about one noun phrase in the
topic, it also seems to be able to be a comment on other elements; for
example in cases such as the following, the comment appears to be
related to the adjective.
(91) John was lucky got away with it.
Conclusion
Thus, in Belfast English just as in standard English, where the subject is
relativised, an overt relative pronoun or complementiser is required.
What appear to be relative clauses in violation of this condition in fact
are structures of another type.
It remains to propose how, formally, Belfast English and standard
English differ so that the former, but not the latter, allows topic-type
structures of the sort we have been discussing. These are not in fact
'topics' of the same type as found in standard English and discussed in
Lasnik and Saito (1992). In both standard English and Belfast English,
topicalisation to a position adjoined to SPEC/IP is possible.
(92) Newspapers, I really like.
(93) This pen, he writes his essays with.
Here, there is a gap in the site coreferential with the topic. On the con-
trary, gaps are impossible except in subject position in overtly intro-
duced topics.
(94) *See newspapers I really like.
(95) *You know this pen, he writes his essays with.
It seems that in overtly introduced topic structures, the topic sentence

is outside the matrix clause. This is similar to left-dislocation structures,
except that instead of a single NP, a full CP is involved.
In standard English, TOP P does not seem to be able to be realised by a

CP, but only by an NP.
(97) That book, I really like it.
In Belfast English however, it is possible for the TOPIC to contain a

whole CP.
Exactly where this piece of information is stored in the grammar is
difficult to say; but it is clearly the case that the expansion of TOP P by
different phrasal categories must be a dimension along which languages
and dialects may differ.
7
Conclusion
In the preceding chapters we have examined a number of the ways in

which Belfast English differs syntactically from standard English. We
saw that there are a number of underlying differences between the
dialects, and even within Belfast English, and the differences did not
appear to reduce to the effects of one or two parameter-setting differ-
ences whose effects spread throughout the grammar.
However, all of the differences observed were of the same type as
differences found between languages; they related for example to the
strength or weakness of functional elements, or the status of elements as
clitics or independent items.
Thus, it seems that, if the Belfast English case is representative,
dialects differ from one another, as one might expect, in the same way
that languages do: the difference between "language" and "dialect" is
after all more a political than a linguistic construct. It was not the case
that, to account for the fine-grained differences found between dialects,
we had to resort to language-particular rules, or any kind of "micro-
parameters" which differ from the kinds of parameter which account for
more substantial differences between languages.
However, it is notable that, in order to account for the differences we
found, we needed to allow the following possible types of parametric
difference.
First, we had to allow that there could be "optionality." For example,
we noted that in dialect B imperatives, raising of the verb to C was
optional; the same applies to inversion in embedded questions, which
may or may not occur. To account for these facts, we need either to
allow optionality of movement or to allow functional elements to be
136
Conclusion 137
optionally strong or weak. The former approach seems not to be desir-

able, since we would lose the very considerable and apparently correct
predictions made by the claim that movement only occurs if forced. It
seems therefore that the second approach is correct. Functional ele-
ments may be characterised in the lexicon as strong, weak, or "either,"
with the imperative morpheme which occurs in C in Belfast dialect B,
and the wh-complementiser which occurs in embedded questions,
falling into the "either" category.
The only option to this would be to claim that Belfast speakers are bi-
dialectal, sometimes using one set of parameter settings and sometimes
another; but there is no evidence of this. The varying elements occur
alongside one another throughout conversations where there is no
noticeable shift of style or topic, to a much greater extent than the nor-
mal code-mixing and code-switching which occurs among bilingual
speakers.
Thus, first, we must admit optionality into the grammar, at least in
terms of the lexical specification of functional elements.
Second, we must also clearly allow that parameters may be set in
relation to individual functional elements in the lexicon, rather than for
the language as a whole. Thus, in both Belfast English and standard
English C is generally weak; there is not generalised verb-raising to C
as in other Germanic languages (Vikner 1991). However, Belfast Eng-
lish differs from standard English in that some of the elements which
may occur in C are specified as strong—the imperative morpheme and
the wh-complementiser which occurs in embedded questions, for
example.
We also noted that Belfast English differed from standard English in
allowing a topic-presenting sentence to occur before the root clause.
This meant that apparently root phenomena—such as root null sub-
jects—could occur in what appeared to be embedded clauses, but were
in fact root clauses preceded by a topic-presenting sentence. Clearly,
this is a phrase-structural difference between the two varieties, and
seems to show that there is at least one way in which the phrase struc-
tures of different languages can be different.
We noted that, because of the variation apparent within Belfast Eng-
lish, children must be able to acquire language on the basis of input
from adults whose grammars exemplify different parameter settings.
We saw in Chapter 3 that under these circumstances children do not
necessarily select a grammar which covers all the data they hear; thus
13 8 BELFAST ENGLISH AND STANDARD ENGLISH
the language-learning task, in terms of learnability, seems to be, not to

hypothesise or select the grammar which covers all the data, but to
select, from among the small range of possibilities offered by UG, the
parameter setting which best fits most of the data; it thus seems that lan-
guage-learning must be strongly internally driven, with internally gen-
erated possibilities being tested against the data, rather than with the
data driving the acquisition of grammar. We suggested that there might
also be a simplicity metric involved: a grammar would be preferred
which had a single specification for the C position, or all elements in
that position, over one where one element which could occur in the
complementiser position had to be lexically specified as different from
the others; such a specification would only be developed where there
was a large amount of compelling evidence in its favour.
Finally, it is interesting to observe that there seems to be a qualitative
difference between the kind of highly constrained, parametrically speci-
fied variation we have found in this study, and the wide range of phono-
logical variation noted in sociolinguistic studies of Belfast English
phonology (Milroy 1980, Milroy 1981). There, the range of possibilities
was much wider, and speakers appeared to be able to develop phonolo-
gies which incorporated rules whose probability of occurrence was
weighted (see Henry, 1993 for further discussion of phonology/syntax
differences in acquisition). It appears to be generally true that syntactic
variation between dialects is much more restricted that phonological
variation, suggesting that the learning mechanisms may be different,
syntax being wholly parametrically determined, but phonology able to
contain, as Bromberger and Halle (1989) suggest, at least some rules.
Notes
Chapter 2
1. Care is needed in obtaining intuitions on these cases. In particular, it is
important to obtain judgments from speakers who themselves use the -uns
forms, rather than from speakers who have regularly heard the forms but do not
use them. The latter appear to analyse the -uns forms as pronoun-noun combi-
nations like you guys and thus, while permitting singular concord, do not allow
the -uns forms in tag questions, or for the second occurrence of a referent.
Chapter 3
1. This means that raising does not take place to a position above NEG; in
this, Belfast English differs from the Scandinavian languages, where the object
moves to a position above negation. It may be that the difference is caused by a
different position for negation in the two language types—in NEG° in English,
but left-adjoined to VP like adverbs in the Scandinavian languages.
2. Beukema and Coopmans (1989) argue that the null subject in imperatives
is a variable associated with a discourse-identified null topic, rather than pro.
However, there is evidence against this analysis in that a null subject is an
imperative cannot be third person when indentified by an appropriate discourse
element.
(i) Everybody take out their books. After that, write down their names
The second sentence cannot be interpreted to mean that everyone should write
down their own name; rather everyone must write down the names of another
group of people. The sentence must be interpreted as having the subject you,
rather than everyone. If the null subject were a variable bound by a discourse-
identified topic, then it ought to be able to be interpreted as everyone. On the
139
140 Notes
contrary, the null subject must be interpreted as second person, suggesting that
imperatives have an obligatorily L+2sg] AGR which identifies the subject.
Chapter 4
1. It appears that this dialect was more widespread in the relatively recent
past; thus Joyce (1910), in his book English as we speak it in Ireland notes that
" 'For' is constantly used before the infinitive," quoting as an example the fol-
lowing lines from a folksong:
'And "Oh sailor dear" said she,

"How came you here by me?"
And then she began for to cry'
Although Joyce suggests that this is a characterisitic borrowed from Irish, it
seems in fact that "for to" occured in earlier varieties of English; it is found in
Chaucer, and indeed also occurs in Shakespeare and as late as Dickens, though
in the latter only in the reported speech of the "lower classes." Lightfoot
(1981:111) notes that it was in common use in standard English until around
1600, quoting the following examples.
(ii) a. For to go is necessary

b. It is good for to go
c. ... that stood in aunter for to die
d. The king did it for to have sibbe
e. This is a fouler theft than for to breke a chirche
/ He taketh of nought else kepe, but for to fill his bages
g. For to say the sothe, ye have done marvellously
2. I do not wish to suggest that these infinitives are true subjects; there is
indeed evidence that they are not (see, for example Stowell 1981).
3. This possibility does not exist for all speakers. There is a group of speak-
ers for whom that can only occur if it does not directly follow a wh-word, so
that (ii) is grammatical but (iii) is not
(iii) It depends which story that you believe

(iv) *It depends which that you believe
For this group of speakers that is of course impossible after whether.
4. It is, of course, possible to repeat the preposition for before an NP, as in
(v) What I'm longing for is for a break

but (48) does not have the repetitive quality of this example
5. In order to maintain the argument that for is associated with complements
with a particular semantics, it could conceivably be argued that there are two
different fors in Belfast English, one of which has semantic content and behaves
Notes 141
exactly like the standard English for, and one which has no semantic content
and may appear elsewhere; there would, however, appear to be no arguments in
favour of this from the Belfast English data, where for appears to behave in the
same way in all cases.
Chapter 5
1. Wonder has another use in Belfast English; it can mean "to be surprised,"
and with this meaning takes a that complement.
(vi) I wonder (that) Bill had got that letter.

On this reading, the example given in the text is of course grammatical.
2. It might be thought that, where a wh-element occurs with that, this is not
a case where there is a wh-element in SPEC/CP and a complementiser in C, but
rather a kind of topic structure. Thus, a sentence like:
(vii) It depends which theory that you believe,

might be regarded as deriving from, or being akin to, a structure like:
(viii) It depends which theory it is that you believe.

However, it is clear that this is not the case from the way that the that-trace filter
operates in the structure. Sentences like (ix-x) where the that is followed by a
subject trace are ungrammatical.
(ix) *It depends which theory that makes the best predictions,
(x) *I wonder which author that wrote this book.
On the contrary, in the emphatic structure with it is/was, that occurs.
(xi) It depends which theory it is that makes the best predictions,

(xii) I wonder which author it was that wrote the book.
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INDEX
Acquistion and dialect variation, 78-80, Embedded verb second. See Verb second,
137-138 embedded
Adverbs, position of, 19, 25-26, 57, 60, Exceptional Case Marking. See ECM verbs
67,71,97 Existential there, 122
AGRS, 21-23, 25, 29, 34, 42, 44, 62, 115;
see also SPEC/AGRS Faroese, 38
Agreement, 16^4 Finlay, 8, 16
Arabic, 21-22 for-to infinitives, 81-104
away, as a verb, 58-59 French, 45-46,61
Full copy, 120
Beukema, 48
Bobaljik, 30 German, 61, 68
Grammaticality judgements. See Intuitions
C, see Complementiser Gueron, 36
Carroll, 102-3
Case, 23-25, 28, 32-42, 44, 84, 91, 93 Head Movement Constraint, 42
Chinese, 133-34 Hebrew, 88
Clefts, 125 Highest subject restriction, 131
COMP-trace effect, 97 Historic present, 18
CP recursion, 111-15 Holmberg, 38, 71
Complementiser, 42-44, 66-76, 78,
88-89,97, 107, 109-15, 117- Icelandic, 111
123 Imperatives, 45-80, 96
lowering, 101-2 Infinitives, 62, 69, 81-104
Co-ordination, 23-24, 71 Intuitions, 12-13, 14, 24, 56
Coopmans, 48 Inversion,
in imperatives, 45-80
Danish, 113 in questions, 42-44, 88-89, 105-23,
Demonstratives, 18, 33-34 133
Den Dikken, 69-70 Irish, 7, 37, 119
Diesing, 115 Italian, 69-70
Discrimination against dialect users, 7
rfo-support, 32, 43, 49, 62, 66, 68 Jonas, 30
Doherty, 13, 124, 130-34
Duffield, 13, 28-29 Kayne, 32, 35,69
Dutch, 61,69-70 Koopman, 37
ECM verbs, 92, 97 Language change, 78-80

Education, language in, 7-9 Literary data sources, 13
147
148 Index
Massam, 97 Sequence of tenses, 106

McCloskey, 88. 102, 105, 107, 111-13, Shlonsky, 88
119,131 Singular concord, 16-44
Milroy, 1, 13, 16 SPEC/AGR0P, 72, 77, 96
Mohammad, 21-22 SPEC/AGRHP, 23, 25-26, 28, 30-32, 34,
37-44,61-63,68,75
NEG criterion, 68, 110, 113 SPEC/Tense. See SPEC/TP
Negation and infinitives, 93-95 SPEC/TP, 26-32, 44, 62, 115-16
Negative polarity items, 27-30 Subject contact relatives, 125-35
Non-standard language varieties, problems Subject-verb agreement, 16-44
in studying. 12, 15
Telicity, 53-55, 60
Object shift, 30, 38, 57-58, 71-76, 96 Tense node, 26, 42-43, 62, 66; see also
Optionality, 136-37 SPEC/TP
Ottawa Valley English, 102-3 Topic prominence, 124, 131-35
Ozark English, 101, 103
Parameter setting and dialect variation, Ulster Scots, 7

78-80 Unaccusatives, 54, 60-63
Past tense irregular, 8, 24 -uns pronouns, 18, 21, 34-35, 50, 73,
Pintzuk, 66 139:Chl n]
Plantation, 7
Policansky, 16, 17 Verb-particle construction, 34-38
Pollock, 45-46, 82, 95 Verb second, 68, 110
Postal, 96 embedded, 105-23
PRO, 81-84, 88, 90-93 Verbs, of motion, 52, 60
Pro-drop, 64-65, 127-28, 134, 139:ch3 telic. See Telicity
n2 Vikner, 71, 111, 113, 121, 137
Pronouns, 18, 23-24, 32-42, 57-58, 69, Vocatives, 48, 64
71-76 V2. See Verb second
resumptive, see Resumptive pronoun
see also - uns psssronouns
Welsh, 34
Wh-criterion, 110, 120
Questions, 42-44
Wh-movement, successive cyclic, 118-19
Wh-questions, embedded, 117-23
Relative clauses, 124-37
whether, 88, 107
Religion, language and, 7-8
Resumptive pronouns, 126-27, 131
Rizzi,42, 64, 110, 134 Yiddish, 111, 115
Root null subjects, 128, 134 youse, 18,38,50

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BELFAST ENGLISH AND

Principles and Parameters of Syntactic Saturation

New York Oxford

Copyright © 1995 by Alison Henry

Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

One of the goals of linguistic theory is to establish the extent to which

for non-standard varieties, which have often been regarded simply as

5. Inversion in Embedded Questions 105

6. Subject Contact Relatives 124

The Study of Dialect Variation

One of the major goals of linguistic theory is to establish what is uni-

Although some researchers have hoped that studying dialect variation

determined by innate factors; learners do not add language-particular

Inversion is possible in embedded questions, whereas it is restricted

For to is possible before infinitives:

Relative clauses where the subject is relativised occur without overt

Belfast English: Some Background Information

community of native Irish speakers in the area, although there is a small

Belfast English is not distinguished, either phonologically or grammati-

Although there are now a few government-funded Irish-medium

learn something about local dialects, and a local dialect dictionary is

Principles and Parameters Theory

In accordance with the Minimalist proposals, the phrase structure

Since the Minimalist approach is relatively new, some areas, for

Before we go on to consider this possibility, however, we need to

Studying Non-Standard Language Varieties

A number of problems arise in working with non-standard dialects,

the original data necessarily being able to be checked. Such checking is

In Belfast English, as we will see in some detail in Chapter 2, it is possi-

relates to identifying native speakers of the variety concerned, and

ertheless it is important to note whether features necessarily co-occur in

There is a noticeable difference in subject-verb agreement patterns

many others to originate VP-internally) need not raise to SPEC/AGRSP,

What Is Singular Concord?

The Facts of Singular Concord

Singular concord is available for most speakers in all tenses of the

(6) The students was late.

(7) The girls goes and tells them.

(8) Us and them is always arguing.

(14) These is cracked.

(16) Usuns was late.

We noted above that agreement is obligatory where subject-auxiliary

Summarising, then, in Belfast English a verb with a third person sin-

Singular Concord as a Syntactic Phenomenon

that a syntactically plural NP identifying a single "group" might have a

"Singular Concord" as Lack of Agreement Marking

one; rather, it involves complete lack of agreement marking. (Non-

(39) John and me kicks ourselves.

Similarly, -uns pronouns and pronouns which occur as part of a larger

(41) *Usuns am happy.

This indicates that singular concord is not simply agreement in which

for two reasons. First, there is otherwise no evidence of null expletives

Second, there is no word order difference between the sentences with

In these examples, it can be seen that the word order difference

Chomsky (1992), commenting on these facts in Arabic, suggests the

Thus, the details of neither Mohammad's nor Chomsky's analysis

Some dialects of English appear to allow strong forms identical to the

but such forms are impossible in Belfast English. Co-ordinated pro-

In Belfast English, non-agreement is possible only if the pronouns

Although there is considerable variability in agreement with co-ordi-

larger NP of which they are part, it seems that singular concord is

(47) a. l-?awlaad-u jaa?uu.

(10) SE/BE He went always away.