In Irish, negative polarity items may serve, in apparent isolation, as fragment answers – a possiblity
which seems to be both typologically and theoretically anomalous. This paper tries to resolve
the apparent anomaly in showing that the grammar of Irish includes a movement possiblity which
feeds a clausal ellipsis process of the appropriate kind. Useful by-products of the discussion include
a more comprehensive account than has so far been provided of the inventory of polarity-sensitive
expressions in the language and a more theoretically grounded account of the fronting process
(so-called `Narrative Fronting') than has so far been available.