Abstract
Scottish Gaelic has been traditionally analysed as having a set of adpositions which inflect for person and number. For example, from do (sic) 'to' we find forms such as dhomh (sic) 'to me', dhut (sic) 'to you' and dha (sic) 'to him'. Additionally, most of these prepositions also show morphological fusion with the definite article (e.g. dhan taigh (sic) 'to the house') and may optionally undergo univerbation with a possessive pronoun (dom thaigh (sic) 'to my house'). Stewart & Joseph (2009) analysed the pronominal forms in isolation as a large set of oblique cases marked only in pronouns, rather than as inflected prepositions. In this article, I show how taking into account the morphological alternations in combination with the definite article and possessive pronouns, as well as highlighting functional parallels with the distribution of these forms to case inflections in other languages, suggests an extension of this descriptive analysis to nouns, with a paradigmatic-realisational approach being best-placed to account for the data. A key result of this analysis is that case markers and adpositions are placed on different tiers of description, with Scottish Gaelic using prepositions in the realisation of a large paradigm of local cases. The effects of this large expansion of the local case system upon the historical development of Scottish Gaelic are discussed, including the implications this has for discussions around grammaticalization.