Introduction

Abstract

Abstract The development of word order in Welsh is one of the greatest puzzles in the study of the historical syntax of the language. In its simplest terms, the puzzle is as follows. In Modem Welsh, the unmarked main clause word order is Vero–Subject–Object (VSO). In Middle Welsh, on the other hand, the verb-initial order is not common. The unmarked pattern is that known to traditional Welsh grammarians as the ‘abnormal sentence’ (brawddeg annormal), in which some element precedes the verb, resulting in orders such as Subject–Verb–Object (SVO), Object–Verb–Subject (OVS), Adverb–Verb–Subject–Objectand so on. When we go back further, however, to Old Welsh, the Modern Welsh pattern apparently re-emerges: VSO is once again dominant. The question that arises is: can the language really have moved away from VSO and back again in the course of a thousand years? This is the puzzle that I consider in this book, in particular, the second part–whether (and if so how) Welsh word order moved back to VSO in the transition from Middle to Modern Welsh. In doing so, I shall use a Government and Binding (GB) (Principles and Parameters) framework to trace the development of Welsh word order from the fourteenth to the early nineteenth century. A number of related issues that have been overlooked in the substantial literature on the subject seem to have considerable relevance to this question, in particular the development of the subject pronoun system, the emergence of a system of affirmative main-clause complementizers in Modern Welsh (the ‘pre-sentential particles’), and patterns of clausal coordination.