Initial mutations and gender agreement
89
Lenition is also used to mark grammatical gender with adjectives, as in (4), but in this context it does not always continue erstwhile sandhi lenition, since it is found even after feminine nouns which originally terminated in a consonant. Its application was generalized later, after it had been grammaticalized as an agreement marker (McCone, 1994: 120f.). (4) Irish bean
mhaith
woman(F).NOM.SG good.NOM.F.SG
‘a good woman’ (cf. fear maith ‘a good man’) Equally disjoined from their historical causes are examples where the inital mutation is distinctive and occurs independently of any preceding word, as in example (5). (5) Irish a. /b r is
e:/
hbris ´ei
break-IMP.2SG 3SG.M
‘break it’ b. /vr is
s e:/
hbhris s´ei
break-PST 3SG.M
‘he broke’ Although the case of adjective and past-tense lenition should leave no doubt as to the fact that initial mutations may be employed, from a synchronic point of view, as a morphosyntactic device, the attempts to provide a unified and purely phonological explanation to this phenomenon have been numerous, based either on abstract (non-surfacing) phonemes or on diacritics and readjustment rules. Kallen (1979: 19–27) surveys a number of them, pointing out their ad-hoc nature, the fact that they lead to a proliferation of underlying abstract forms, and the impossibility of subjecting any of these hypotheses to empirical testing. Furthermore, they fail to provide any type of generalization or further insight “beyond that found in a traditional list of mutating environments” (p. 26). This, Kallen observes, is ultimately a consequence of the “lack of any predictable surface phonological environment