Clause Typing in the Old Irish Verbal Complex

Clause Typing in the Old Irish Verbal Complex PDF

Author: Carlos García-Castillero

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2020-07-06

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 3110680408

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Austin’s words on page 1 of his seminal work How to do things with words are valid for this study on clause typing in the Old Irish verbal complex: “The phenomenon to be discussed is very widespread and obvious, and it cannot fail to have been already noticed, at least here and there, by others. Yet I have not found attention paid to it specifically”. Old Irish, a regular V1 language, morphologically distinguishes six clause types, to wit, declarative, relative, wh- and polar interrogative, responsive and imperative clause types. After discussing the constituency of the Old Irish verbal complex and the pragmatically marked orders, i.e. cleft-sentence and left-dislocation, the form, function, paradigmatic consistency and syntax of those clause types are then analysed in detail. The other main issues of this study are the descriptively adequate paradigm of clause types and the interaction of clause typing with subordination and with non-verbal predication in Old Irish. This monograph offers a comprehensive view of clause typing, its morphological expression and related phenomena in the earliest Insular Celtic language, and may also contribute to the general consideration of these topics in both the typological and diachronic perspectives.

Morphosyntactic Variation in Medieval Celtic Languages

Morphosyntactic Variation in Medieval Celtic Languages PDF

Author: Elliott Lash

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2020-10-12

Total Pages: 431

ISBN-13: 3110680793

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This book showcases the state of the art in the corpus-based linguistics of medieval Celtic languages. Its chapters detail theoretical advances in analysing variation/change in the Celtic languages and computational tools necessary to process/analyse the data. Many contributions situate the Celtic material in the broader field of corpus-based diachronic linguistics. The application of computational methods to Celtic languages is in its infancy and this book is a first in medieval Celtic Studies, which has mainly concentrated on philological endeavours such as editorial and literary work. The Celtic languages represent a new frontier in the development of NLP tools because they pose special challenges, like complicated inflectional morphology with non-straightforward mappings between lemmata and attested forms, irregular orthography, and consonant mutations. With so much data available in non-electronic form and ongoing efforts to convert these data to computer-readable format, there is much room for the developing/testing of new tools. This books provides an overview of this process at a crucial time in the development of the field and aims to the data accessible to computational linguists with an interest in diachronic change.

The Grammaticalization of Tense, Aspect, Modality and Evidentiality

The Grammaticalization of Tense, Aspect, Modality and Evidentiality PDF

Author: Kees Hengeveld

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2017-09-11

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 3110517426

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This book brings together a series of contributions to the study of grammaticalization of tense, aspect, and modality from a functional perspective. All contributions share the aim to uncover the functional motivations behind the processes of grammaticalization under discussion, but they do so from different points of view.

The Syntax of the Sentence in Old Irish

The Syntax of the Sentence in Old Irish PDF

Author: Pádraig MacCoisdealbha

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2012-10-29

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 3110952661

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Old Irish is the language of Ireland in the period from the 8th to the 10th century AD, and is the oldest Celtic language well enough attested for adequate grammatical study. The book provides the only available detailed linguistic analysis of the syntactic structure of the Old Irish sentence. The basic form of the simple sentence, with the usual order of elements, verb-subject-object, is unproblematic from a synchronic viewpoint, but certain sentence types show more complex patterns of syntax, which have important implications for the typological, diachronic and comparative-historical analysis of Old Irish in particular, and Celtic and Indo-European languages in general. Sentence types which contain obligatory cataphoric pronouns referring to elements later in the same sentence are examined in detail, as well as constructions with marked initial topics, and the focussing construction of the cleft sentence. The approach is functional and typological, on the basis of a text corpus from the glosses on the Pauline epistles at Würzburg, with further material from Old Irish legal texts. The emphasis is on the communicative content and intent of the sentences of the corpus. The book is a newly edited version of MacCoisdealbha's Bochum dissertation of 1974, previously unpublished due to the author's death in 1976, and includes textual notes by the editor indicating progress, and indeed lack of progress, in the meantime, in areas covered by the book.

Comparing Welsh and Hebrew

Comparing Welsh and Hebrew PDF

Author: Karel Jongeling

Publisher: Leiden University Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13:

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Comparing Welsh and Hebrew consists of two parts. In the first part the author discusses the history of the comparison of Welsh and Hebrew. In the first half of the seventeenth century the comparability of Welsh and Hebrew, on the level of syntax as well as on the level of the lexicon, was extensively discussed. This is, of course, a long time before the emergence of historical linguistics in its own right in the nineteenth century, and therefore only interesting from a historical point of view. However, the insight that Celtic is one of the branches of the Indo-European languages, accepted since the second half of the nineteenth century, was not enough to put an end to this discussion. It rather made a change in the type of solution proposed. The second part of this study gives an overview of the points comparable in Hebrew and Welsh syntax. There are even more of them than supposed by earlier scholars. The question how this situation came about is tentatively solved by the supposition of an Afro-Asiatic substratum in the British Isles, and perhaps also on the Atlantic shores of the continent.