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.
