The Initial Consonant Mutation system of Welsh is unique to Indo-European languages and has been the subject of much theoretical research. The multi-faceted nature of the phenomenon demands multi-dimensional treatment and this uniquely comprehensive book provides an integrated overview of this important feature from a wide linguistic viewpoint. In Welsh, Initial Consonant Mutation has implications for historical and comparative analyses, phonetic description, phonological theory, syntactic theory, and the interfaces between phonetics and phonology, morphology and phonology, and phonology and syntax. It also requires examination from semantic, psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic perspectives. This study, therefore, brings together a variety of approaches to a wide range of levels of linguistic analysis, all concentrated on one unusual linguistic feature. A detailed review of past research, together with an exploration of recent theoretical advances in many areas, makes this an indispensable book for departments of Celtic Studies and all scholars of comparative linguistics.

An accessible and comp guide to the Welsh language as it is spoken today. The book is organised to enable a thorough understanding of Welsh grammar and is an ideal reference source for both the user and learner of Welsh.

This book explores patterns of marked variation in the use of the Welsh language, looking at them from the linguistic viewpoint -- variation at different levels of language, and from the sociolinguistic viewpoint -- regional and social varieties.

The first comprehensive account of Welsh phonology opens with a concise history of the language and its relation to the other Celtic languages. Six chapters then explore its sound system, including the phonetic background, syllables, feet, phonotactics, and stress, and the characteristics of the dialects.

Welsh, like the other Celtic languages, is best known amongst linguists for its verb-initial word order and its use of initial consonant mutations. However it has many more characteristics which are of interest to syntacticians. This book, first published in 2007, provides a concise and accessible overview of the major syntactic phenomena of Welsh. A broad variety of topics are covered, including finite and infinitival clauses, noun phrases, agreement and tense, word order, clause structure, dialect variation, and the language's historical Celtic background. Drawing on work carried out in both Principles and Parameters theory and Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, it takes contemporary colloquial Welsh as its starting point and draws contrasts with a range of literary and dialectal forms of the language, as well as earlier forms (Middle Welsh) were appropriate. An engaging guide to all that is interesting about Welsh syntax, this book will be welcomed by syntactic theorists, typologists, historical linguists and Celticists alike.

The papers in this volume celebrate the work of Angus McIntosh, who specialized in dialects of Later Middle English, and wrote on other topics in English linguistics as well. Of the papers in this volume most deal with English and a few with other subjects in (historical) dialectology.

The papers in this volume celebrate the work of Angus McIntosh, who specialized in dialects of Later Middle English, and wrote on other topics in English linguistics as well. Of the papers in this volume most deal with English and a few with other subjects in (historical) dialectology.

Does a bilingual person have two separate lexicons and two separate grammatical systems? Or should the bilingual linguistic competence be regarded as an integrated system? This book explores this issue, which is central to current debate in the study of bilingualism, and argues for an integrated hypothesis: the linguistic competence of an individual is a single cognitive faculty, and the bilingual mind should not be regarded as fundamentally different from the monolingual one. This conclusion is backed up with a variety of empirical data, in particular code-switching, drawn from a variety of bilingual pairs. The book introduces key notions in minimalism and distributed morphology, making them accessible to readers with different scholarly foci. This book is of interest to those working in linguistics and psycholinguistics, especially bilingualism, code-switching, and the lexicon.