Accounting for do-support Post-Syntactically: Evidence from Old Irish

Since Chomsky (1957) much has been written on the topic of do-support and its connection to affix hopping in English. However, as yet no definitive analysis has been proposed. This paper considers a parallel to English do-support, namely the use of the dummy particle no in Old Irish (OIr). A post-syntactic account of this phenomenon in OIr is developed within the framework of Distributed Morphology/DM (Halle and Marantz, 1993) and the possibility of applying such an account to English do-support is considered.