Asymmetric Chains and Defective Goals

This paper focuses on two phenomena in Irish agreement, namely complementarity<br>between overt in-situ arguments and agreement, and the obviation of this complementarity<br>under A-movement. An analysis of these facts is offered in terms the defective<br>goal ‘incorporation’ (DGI) mechanism proposed by Roberts (2010), and applied<br>to cases of complementarity in Bantu languages by Iorio (2014), van der Wal (2015,<br>2020, 2022), as well as asymmetric chains under A-movement, consisting of a full copy<br>and a pronominal φ-feature bundle, cf. similar configurations discussed by Takahashi<br>and Hulsey (2009), Harizanov (2014), Kramer (2014), Baker and Kramer (2018), inter<br>alios. It is shown that this approach accounts for the facts in Irish, and that the same account<br>can be extended to explain facts concerning participial agreement in e.g. Italian.<br>Additional crosslinguistic implications are also considered, particularly with respect to<br>French and Welsh.<br>