[This is part of a series of defectivity case studies. Hat tip to John Hutchinson for this valuable information.]

I am currently wrapping up a class at the LSA Institute class on defectivity, and as part of this class students presented case studies. Some of them students enriched case studies I have already presented in this defectivity blog series; the following new-to-me case was provided to us by John Hutchinson of the University of Surrey.

Defective verbs in Gaelic have been long noted, particularly by Dwelly (1911) and Maclaren (1935). They are something of a grab-bag. First, there are verbs with tense restrictions:

• The verb of quotation ars/orsa ‘said’ is restricted to past tense only.
• Where English has the adverb almost, Gaelic has theab, which selects a verb-noun complement (e.g., theab e fhéin a bhith marbh ‘he was almost dead’) and which is also restricted to past tense.
• The verb faod ‘may’ is non-past only.
• The verb feum ‘must’ is non-past only, though Hutchinson notes that past forms do occur in corpora.

There are also a number of verbs which occur only in the imperative (cf. my judgments about English beware):

• trothad/trobhad ‘come here’
• t(h)iugainn ‘come along’
• thalla ‘go away’
• siuthad ‘go on, fire away’
• feuch ‘behold’ (though note this is not defective in the sense of ‘show’)

Finally, Hutchinson notes that prepositions are inflected for person and number but eadar ‘between’ (naturally enough) only has plural forms. These cases of defectivity make a lot of semantic sense to me, particularly the restriction on the modal-like verbs and on ‘between’.

References

Dwelly, E. 1911. Illustrated Gaelic English Dictionary. Alex Maclaren & Sons.
Maclaren, J. 1935. Maclaren’s Gaelic Self-Taught, 4th edition. Alex Maclaren & Sons.