Periodic Reporting for period 1 - MAIRWEN (Mapping Argument Structure in Early Irish and Welsh)
Reporting period: 2019-10-01 to 2021-09-30
This research project focussed on a particular grammatical issue in Old Irish, namely the syntactical and grammatical properties of subjects. Old Irish was the language of texts written in Ireland between the seventh and ninth centuries CE. We already know a lot about it; we can read the texts that have come down to us from that period and we have a good idea of how the language worked. But questions always remain.
Current theoretical approaches to language have done a lot of work on non-canonical subjects, that is, subjects that are not in the canonical nominative case. In English, for example, the usual way is to say “I think”, using the nominative form of the pronoun, but we can also say “methinks”, using the accusative form (normally employed for the object of a verb). Why is that? Of course, if we want to say that the subject of the sentence (often explained as the “doer of the action”) does not have to appear in the case that we associate with it, we need to have other ways to determine what the subject of the sentence actually is. In other words, if nominative case is not always a property of subjects, then what other subject properties are there? This is the topic of the research. Simply said, what makes a subject in Old Irish?
Current theoretical approaches to language have done a lot of work on non-canonical subjects, that is, subjects that are not in the canonical nominative case. In English, for example, the usual way is to say “I think”, using the nominative form of the pronoun, but we can also say “methinks”, using the accusative form (normally employed for the object of a verb). Why is that? Of course, if we want to say that the subject of the sentence (often explained as the “doer of the action”) does not have to appear in the case that we associate with it, we need to have other ways to determine what the subject of the sentence actually is. In other words, if nominative case is not always a property of subjects, then what other subject properties are there? This is the topic of the research. Simply said, what makes a subject in Old Irish?
The project looked at three main aspects of Old Irish grammar to determine how subjects behave in the sentence: word order, relative clauses, and verbal noun constructions.
The word order research has confirmed earlier research (Le Mair et al., 2017) that an important subject characteristic in Old Irish is its location in the sentence. Standard Old Irish word order is verb – subject – object. That is, in contrast to for example English, where the subject comes first in the sentence, in Old Irish, the verb comes first and is followed by the subject. Word order can of course vary (for example, in English, in a question, the verb comes first), but in a basic sentence, the subject follows the verb.
Unfortunately, the research on relative clauses did not lead to any significant results. A relative clause usually further describes another part of the sentence, to which it refers. Unfortunately, relative clauses that clearly distinguish between subjects and objects are exceedingly rare in my corpus, too rare to draw any conclusions from.
Lastly, and most promisingly, came the work on verbal nouns. Verbal nouns are a feature of Old Irish (and also, for example, Modern Irish and Modern Welsh), they are nouns that have a strong verbal connotation. They have significant overlap with infinitives (e.g. ‘to sing’) and gerunds (e.g. ‘singing’) in other languages, but are quite different from either of these. The project ended before I could analyse and write up all the data and results, but several subject properties and subject tests have come from this research and will be disseminated in the near future.
The word order research has confirmed earlier research (Le Mair et al., 2017) that an important subject characteristic in Old Irish is its location in the sentence. Standard Old Irish word order is verb – subject – object. That is, in contrast to for example English, where the subject comes first in the sentence, in Old Irish, the verb comes first and is followed by the subject. Word order can of course vary (for example, in English, in a question, the verb comes first), but in a basic sentence, the subject follows the verb.
Unfortunately, the research on relative clauses did not lead to any significant results. A relative clause usually further describes another part of the sentence, to which it refers. Unfortunately, relative clauses that clearly distinguish between subjects and objects are exceedingly rare in my corpus, too rare to draw any conclusions from.
Lastly, and most promisingly, came the work on verbal nouns. Verbal nouns are a feature of Old Irish (and also, for example, Modern Irish and Modern Welsh), they are nouns that have a strong verbal connotation. They have significant overlap with infinitives (e.g. ‘to sing’) and gerunds (e.g. ‘singing’) in other languages, but are quite different from either of these. The project ended before I could analyse and write up all the data and results, but several subject properties and subject tests have come from this research and will be disseminated in the near future.
This study has taken us beyond the current state of the art in Celtic linguistics in being the first of its kind to take a syntactical approach to subjecthood in Old Irish. In 2022, I look forward to publishing the results of this study in two articles, one dealing specifically with verbal nouns and infinitives in Old Irish and the other incorporating those results together with work on relative clauses and word order to provide an overview of subjecthood and subject properties in Old Irish.