Unaccusativity and the subject pronoun in Middle and Early Modern Irish

Abstract

This article examines Middle and Early Modern Irish sentences like in mairenn hé? ‘does he live?’ and do-chádar d’éag uile iad ‘they all died’ in which the subject pronoun has the form normally associated with the subject of a passive-impersonal verb or the direct object of a transitive verb. References to this construction in the Classical Modern Irish grammatical tracts are discussed first, Middle and Early Modern Irish examples are then presented, and their syntax and semantics are investigated. It is argued that the subject in these sentences is not the semantic agent and that this motivates the use of these pronominal forms. This construction is then placed in a wider typological context. Finally, attention is drawn to a possible precursor construction in which the subject pronoun takes the form of an infix.