Is This Verb a Word? A philological Study of the Distribution of Phonological and Morphological Domains in the Middle Welsh Verb

The - for European languages - large amount of bound elements in the older Insular Celtic languages and the array of phonological interactions within morphological and phrasal structures have lead several researchers to conclude that individual words play a lesser role in the grammars of those languages. Based on current typological research on wordhood and a thorough discussion of the problems and limitations of studying wordhood in corpus languages, this article gives an in-depth investigation of the morphological and phonological word-like domains in the Middle Welsh verbal complex. There are several structures that could be labelled ‘word’ on the basis of the findings presented here, which leads to the conclusion that the term is not very useful for the synchronic description of this language

Evidence for Britain and Ireland as a linguistic area

Approaches to linguistic areas have largely focused either on purely qualitative investigation of area formation processes, on quantitative and qualitative exploration of synchronic distributions of linguistic features without considering time, or on theoretical issues related to the definition of the notion "linguistic area". What is still missing are approaches that supplement qualitative research on area formation processes with quantitative methods. Taking a bottom-up approach, we bypass notional issues and propose to quantify area formation processes by a) measuring the change in linguistic similarity given a geographical space, a socio-cultural setting, a time span, a language sample, and a set of linguistic data, and b) testing the tendency and magnitude of the process using Bayesian inference. Applying this approach to the expression of reflexivity in a dense sample of languages in northwestern Europe from the early Middle Ages to the present, we show that the method yields robust quantitative evidence for a substantial gain in linguistic similarity that sets the languages of Britain and Ireland apart from languages spoken outside Britain and Ireland and cross-cuts lines of linguistic ancestry

S, A, and P argument demotion with preverbal imm-(a-N) in Old and Middle Irish

The intricate preverbal complex of medieval Irish hosts a morpheme imm-(a-N) with very peculiar constructional and semantic properties. In this article, we venture to give a description of imm-(a-N) by taking into account the various changes it induces on argument representation, and explore how it modifies the semantics of the verb stem it combines with. The chronology of the data at our disposal suggests that it first denoted reciprocal states of affairs and quickly developed into a device expressing collective simultaneous action events (csa, i. e., multiple participants perform the same action in the same temporal and locational setting, but not on each other) and from the point of view of semantics are treated as active verbs. As far as argument representation is concerned, it develops into a construction which combines both features of the passive (subject demotion) and the antipassive (object demotion) diathesis.Démotion du sujet et de l’objet direct avec imm-(a-N) en irlandais médiéval. L’irlandais médiéval est susceptible d’intégrer dans son complexe verbal un morphème imm-(a-N) avec des propriétés syntaxiques et sémantiques très particulières. Dans cet article, nous nous proposons de fournir une description de l’emploi d’imm-(a-N), tout en tenant compte des différents changements que ce morphème induit sur la réalisation des arguments, et d’explorer la manière dont imm-(a-N) modifie la sémantique du verbe. La chronologie des données à notre disposition suggère qu’à l’origine, les constructions comportant ce morphème imm-(a-N) ont servi à désigner des événements réciproques et que, à partir de là, elles sont rapidement devenues un moyen pour exprimer des événements d’action collective simultanée (plusieurs participants effectuent la même action dans le même contexte temporel et local, mais pas réciproquement) ; du point de vue de la sémantique, ces constructions se comportent comme des verbes actifs. En ce qui concerne la réalisation des arguments, elles combinent à la fois des caractéristiques du passif (démotion du sujet) et de l’antipassif (démotion de l’objet).Dedio Stefan, Widmer Paul. S, A, and P argument demotion with preverbal imm-(a-N) in Old and Middle Irish. In: Etudes Celtiques, vol. 43, 2017. pp. 187-206