Focus, Constituent Negation, and Prosody in Irish and the Role of Exhaustivity and Clefting in Corrections

Irish presents a twofold restriction on negation: it lacks constituent negation, and sentential negation can only take sentential scope; Irish employs negative clefts for constituent negation. I argue that these restrictions follow from independent conditions on the realisation of Focus. Prosodically, Irish disfavours in situ marking of narrow Focus and rather resorts to Focus-fronting. Hence, unlike in Italian, sentential negation cannot associate with a corrective Focus in its scope. Irish realises corrective Focus with cleft sentences; since constituent negation prototypically associates with corrective Focus, it is consequently relegated to negative clefts. I argue that the underlying factor in this distribution is exhaustivity, which in Irish is syntacticised by clefts: Irish realises correction as exhaustive Focus plus incompatibility with a previous assertion. I conclude with some speculations on the role of the copula in deriving the exhaustivity of clefts and discuss how exhaustivity constrains the distribution of Irish monotone decreasing expressions.