Aspectuality in Welsh

Abstract

When discussing aspectuality, a distinction is normally made between grammatical and lexical aspect. Both are linked, to varying degrees, to the category of tense. The existence of grammatical aspect in a language is normally accepted if it is fully expressed in a grammatical category, preferably a verbal one, as seems to be prototypically encoded in some Slavic languages. Questions concerning aspect have been posed for Welsh, since perfectivity could be expressed by the verbal particle ro- in its older stages. However, Modern Welsh differentiates synthetically between six tenses for the verb bod ‘to be’ and four for all of the others (save defective verbs) in the Indicative, the category looked at here. It is little surprising, therefore, that the aspect dichotomy of perfectivity vs. imperfectivity is not expressed morphologically. However, based on field work, it has been established that issues of aspectuality in Welsh are typically expressed by employing its periphrastic VSO structure, i.e. verb–noun constructions with linking elements of varying synsemantica between the finite VS- and the “O-phrase” (complement).