The Syntax of the Sentence in Old Irish

Selected Studies from a Descriptive, Historical and Comparative Point of View. New Edition with Additional Notes and an Extended Bibliography

Pádraig MacCoisdealbha, Graham R. Isaac

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9783484429161
• eBook ISBN: 9783110952667
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historical & Comparative Linguistics
• Index: Literature

Old Irish is the language of Ireland in the period from the 8th to the 10th century AD, and is the oldest Celtic language well enough attested for adequate grammatical study. The book provides the only available detailed linguistic analysis of the syntactic structure of the Old Irish sentence. The basic form of the simple sentence, with the usual order of elements, verb-subject-object, is unproblematic from a synchronic viewpoint, but certain sentence types show more complex patterns of syntax, which have important implications for the typological, diachronic and comparative-historical analysis of Old Irish in particular, and Celtic and Indo-European languages in general. Sentence types which contain obligatory cataphoric pronouns referring to elements later in the same sentence are examined in detail, as well as constructions with marked initial topics, and the focussing construction of the cleft sentence. The approach is functional and typological, on the basis of a text corpus from the glosses on the Pauline epistles at Würzburg, with further material from Old Irish legal texts. The emphasis is on the communicative content and intent of the sentences of the corpus.

The book is a newly edited version of MacCoisdealbha's Bochum dissertation of 1974, previously unpublished due to the author's death in 1976, and includes textual notes by the editor indicating progress, and indeed lack of progress, in the meantime, in areas covered by the book.

Table of contents

• Editor’s Preface
• Author’s Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 1.1 The syntax of the verb in Celtic
• 1.2 ‘Word order’ in language
• 1.3 Scope of the study
• 1.4 A textual approach to the Old Irish glosses
• 1.5 ‘Style’ and the theory of Functional Sentence Perspective
• 2 Cataphora and the copular sentence
• 2.1 Cataphora in various languages
• 2.2 Grammaticalization of the cataphoric type in languages
• 2.3 Cataphora and communicative function
• 2.4 ‘Prolepsis’/cataphora in Irish
• 2.5 Cataphora in the copular sentence
• 2.6 Subject and predicate in the copular sentence
• 2.7 Ambiguity in class VII
• 2.8 The function of cataphora
• 2.9 Correlatives
• 2.10 Welsh parallels
• 2.11 Common Celtic cataphora?
• 2.12 The Law texts
• 3 Synchronic and diachronic aspects of various copular sentence types
• 3.1 Formal description
• 3.2 The origins and function of classes Ia-Id
• 3.3 Desubstantivization of the demonstrative
• 3.4 The semantic requirement + DEFINITE
• 3.5 Some pertinent literature
• 3.6 Cleft sentences
• 3.7 Summary of copular types
• 3.8 Diachronic aspects compared
• 3.9 The Law texts
• 4 Resumptive constructions: topicalization
• 4.1 The ‘nominativus pendens’ in Irish
• 4.2 Description of the resumptive sentence in Wb
• 4.3 Resumptive constructions in other languages
• 4.4 Thematic organization – topicalization
• 4.5 The Law texts
• 4.6 Further comparative and historical aspects – Celtic
• 4.7 Topicalization and the relative: historical considerations
• 5 The cleft sentence
• 5.1 Preliminaries
• 5.2 A formal description
• 5.3 The adverb
• 5.4 ‘Emphasis’ and related notions
• 5.5 The function of the cleft sentence
• 5.6 Attitudinal disjuncts
• 5.7 Historical
• 5.8 Literature
• 5.9 Conclusions
• 6 ‘Bergin’s Law’ and the cleft sentence
• 6.1 The Law texts
• 6.2 ‘Bergin’s Law’
• 6.3 Bergin’s Law vs. Bergin’s rule
• 6.4 The copula in Bergin’s Law
• 6.5 The irregular types and tendencies – a reconstruction
• 6.6 The nature of the language?
• 6.7 Artificial language
• 6.8 Conclusions
• Appendix
• Editor’s Notes
• Bibliography