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.

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.

This monograph offers a systematic description of the expression of clause typing in the Old Irish (7th-9th AD) verbal complex and discusses some of its diachronic aspects. The available evidence is rich enough as to make relevant statements about

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.

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.

Abstracts of dissertations available on microfilm or as xerographic reproductions.