Syntax Of Welsh Research Articles

Anomalous transfer of syntax between languages.

Each human language possesses a set of distinctive syntactic rules. Here, we show that balanced Welsh-English bilinguals reading in English unconsciously apply a morphosyntactic rule that only exists in Welsh. The Welsh soft mutation rule determines whether the initial consonant of a noun changes based on the grammatical context (e.g., the feminine noun cath--"cat" mutates into gath in the phrase y gath--"the cat"). Using event-related brain potentials, we establish that English nouns artificially mutated according to the Welsh mutation rule (e.g., "goncert" instead of "concert") require significantly less processing effort than the same nouns implicitly violating Welsh syntax. Crucially, this effect is found whether or not the mutation affects the same initial consonant in English and Welsh, showing that Welsh syntax is applied to English regardless of phonological overlap between the two languages. Overall, these results demonstrate for the first time that abstract syntactic rules transfer anomalously from one language to the other, even when such rules exist only in one language.

The syntax of Welsh “direct object mutation” revisited

Like all the Celtic languages, Welsh displays a set of initial consonantal mutations. Most instances of mutation have a lexical or morphosyntactic trigger, but a number of the contexts for Soft Mutation are generally considered to be triggered under specific syntactic conditions. This paper investigates the precise syntactic environment in which the process applies. The idea that a major function of this mutation is to mark accusative case on the direct object of a finite verb has a long history, encompassing both traditional grammars and also work within the generative linguistic tradition. Recently, this proposal for ‘direct object mutation’ has been revived and extended, within a Minimalist framework, by Ian Roberts. Roberts argues that the mutation is linked with the raising of a finite verb, and marks (abstract) accusative Case. Here, a range of data is considered which has not previously been discussed in connection with syntactic Soft Mutation. On the basis of this, I argue that the trigger for mutation proposed by Roberts is unworkable, and that the Case hypothesis is both too weak and also too strong. An existing analysis of syntactic Soft Mutation, the XP Trigger Hypothesis, not only captures the generalizations discussed by Roberts, but also correctly predicts the occurrence of all other instances of the syntactic mutation, unifying these into a single environment.

Prospects in Old Irish syntax

I begin with a brief piece of history: after studying in UCD, Pádraig Mac Coisdealbha went as a postgraduate to the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, where he researched for his doctorate under Professor Karl Horst Schmidt. He successfully completed this in 1974, with the dissertation entitled ‘The syntax of the sentence in Old Irish: selected studies from a descriptive, comparative and historical point of view’. On a visit to Ireland in 1976, he was killed in a car crash, aged 26. The dissertation was issued posthumously by the University in Bochum in a simple binding, under the direction of Professor Schmidt, and copies had been available in major Celtic library collections since then. In 1994, while I was conducting research into early Welsh syntax in Bonn, Professor Schmidt asked me to edit Mac Coisdealbha's work for full publication, taking account of the progress of research in the field in the meantime. After various delays, the book was finally published in 1998.

Syntactic Change in Welsh: A Study of the Loss of Verb-Second (review)

Reviewed by: Syntactic change in Welsh: A study of the loss of verb-second by David W. E. Willis Joseph F. Eska Syntactic change in Welsh: A study of the loss of verb-second. By David W. E. Willis. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Pp. xiii, 306. Surely the best known feature of Middle Welsh syntax is that V1 configurations are vanishingly rare in positive nonimperative matrix clauses, unlike the sparsely attested records of Old Welsh and all of Modern Welsh (with a few dialectal exceptions). Unfortunately, since the modern language was taken as the descriptive standard for Middle Welsh, noncleft clauses with other than V1 configurations have traditionally been labelled as exemplifying the ‘abnormal order’ even though they are ubiquitous in the language. Heretofore, most scholars who have examined the diachrony of Welsh configurational syntax have assumed that the abnormal order was never really a feature of vernacular Middle Welsh but an artifact exclusive to the literary language. I, too, subscribed to this view. This volume, however, a revised version of a 1996 Oxford University dissertation, unequivocally establishes that the communis opinio is not correct. Positive nonimperative matrix clauses in Middle Welsh were configurationally V2 (embedded clauses were always V1, and negative nonimperative clauses were predominantly so). W’s detailed volume first provides a sensitive synchronic analysis of the clausal configurational syntax of Middle Welsh within a principles and parameters framework, demonstrating that, as in other V2 languages, a rule of topicalization was in operation which obligatorily raised a constituent to SpecCP; other preverbal constituents—which could only be adverbial—might occur in the surface configuration of a clause, but they were adjoined to CP. Those surface V1 clauses which did occur in Middle Welsh were merely special cases of the V2 parameter; virtually all such examples occur in the second of two conjoined clauses and other contexts of narrative continuity. Having established the existence of a V2 parameter in the synchronic grammar of Middle Welsh, W’s second principal objective is to explain how this parameter was lost between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries. One of the great virtues of his analysis is the extensive use he makes of data drawn from personal letters, the documentation of legal proceedings, etc., closely dated sources which can be presumed to reflect vernacular usage more closely than literary works and which have rarely been drawn upon in studies of the diachronic syntax of the language. Wdemonstrates that during the Middle Welsh [End Page 191] period phonological reduction of preverbal subject pronouns led to a number of exceptions to the V2 parameter. The topicalization of objects also declined during this period. Subsequent phonological erosion of preverbal particles further precipitated the loss of the V2 parameter, and by the second half of the sixteenth century V1 configurations had become quite common in the formal written language, competing with the SVO configuration—the residue of the V2 parameter—which was licensed by the 1588 translation of the Bible into Welsh. Informal written Welsh maintained its SVO configuration through the late eighteenth century when, according to W, it began to yield to V1 for reasons of economy in the computational part of the syntax. Though completely persuaded by the two principal arguments of W’s well-documented study, there are a few points with which I would quibble. He employs data from early heroic poetic texts such as Canu Aneirin as evidence of Old Welsh usage even though the manuscripts date from the Middle Welsh period and the language is usually significantly different from texts which are recognized by all as Old Welsh. He also doubts the double base hypothesis of language variation leading to language change developed by Anthony Kroch and colleagues (45) while accepting Kroch’s constant rate hypothesis of variation leading to change (47) which, to my mind, are two facets of a single perspective (W later refers to the competition of forms in language change (261), a defining characteristic of the double base hypothesis). Such quibbles do not detract in any way from the importance of W’s overall conclusions, which have far-reaching consequences for the history of the Brittonic branch of the Celtic language family. Now we need to focus...

Welsh Syntax: A Government-Binding Approach

Welsh Syntax: A Government-Binding Approach

The Use of Welsh: A Contribution to Sociolinguistics

Welsh is perhaps the most vigorous of the surviving Celtic languages, and has undoubtedly attracted the most modern linguistic research. It is surprising therefore that, while publications on Welsh syntax and phonology have appeared in recent years, no investigation into the sociolinguistics of the language has been available. The linguistic situation in Wales is a complex one, and Welsh as a minority language has not found the establishment and maintenance of a standard form an easy task. Differences between official and literary forms of the language are then quite marked, and many Welsh speakers have not been greatly exposed to these standardising factors. What we find, therefore, are patterns of marked variation in language use. This book explores these patterns, looking at them from the linguistic viewpoint - variation at different levels of language, and from the sociolinguistic viewpoint - regional and social varieties. Also examined are children's speech, important for the future of the language, and the theoretical problems of integrating varying patterns of language use into grammatical description.

A note on ‘traditional treatments’ of Welsh

In Borsley (I984), I argued on a number of grounds that the complements of Welsh control and raising verbs should be analyzed as VPs and not as clauses with empty subjects. Fife (I986) finds a great deal that he dislikes in the paper. One point recurs throughout his discussion: the suggestion that there are 'traditional treatments' of the phenomena that are preferable to those I espoused. This suggestion deserves serious attention. Clearly, it is possible that linguists whose main concern is with current theoretical debates will overlook important insights in traditional work. In this note, I will consider three areas where Fife suggests that traditional analyses are preferable. In each case, I will argue that there is no basis for his view. I will also suggest that his discussion highlights the limitations of traditional treatments of Welsh syntax. One matter that I was concerned with in my paper was the mutation that is illustrated in examples like the following:

Welsh syntax and VSO structure

L'auteur defend l'idee que les langues VSO, comme le gallois, ont une structure de base SVO et que l'ordre VSO est obtenu par moyen d'une regle de montee du verbe. Discussion sur les implications theoriques de cette hypothese dans le cadre theorique du liage et du gouvernement