On the nature of A-movement in modern Ulster Irish

This paper investigates the nature of A-movement in modern Ulster Irish (Irish, hereafter), and considers its theoretical implications. Irish allows resumptive pronouns in A-movement. However, it is not always the case that pronominal elements that terminate A-chains may be either silent or lexically specified, which raises the question of when raising is possible in Irish. One crucial difference between grammatical and ungrammatical examples is that in the former, the clause from which raising takes place does not contain a tense element. We take this fact to suggest a view on the nature of phase, the edge feature (=EPP feature), in particular, and propose that C with an edge F only takes a TP whose head has a tense feature.