32.1737, Review: Irish, Old; Historical Linguistics; Syntax: García-Castillero (2020)

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Subject: 32.1737, Review: Irish, Old; Historical Linguistics; Syntax: García-Castillero (2020)

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Date: Tue, 18 May 2021 17:59:23
From: Jean-François Mondon [jfmondon at gmail.com]
Subject: Clause Typing in the Old Irish Verbal Complex

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/31/31-2399.html

AUTHOR: Carlos  García-Castillero
TITLE: Clause Typing in the Old Irish Verbal Complex
SERIES TITLE: Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM]
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2020

REVIEWER: Jean-François R. Mondon, Minot State University

SUMMARY

This book, a continuation of García-Castillero’s very active research agenda,
is a descriptively rich outline of the morphological realizations of clause
types in Old Irish.  It comprises eleven chapters divided over three parts.

Part I offers the linguistic background necessary for full understanding of
clause typing in Old Irish.  It consists of three chapters, the first of which
begins by summarizing the place of Old Irish in the Celtic family tree and the
early glosses (750-850 CE) on three manuscripts: Würzburg, Milan, and St.
Gall.  The chapter then briefly discusses non-graphic variation observable in
the manuscripts, such as the variable position of the perfectivizing morpheme
ro- (e.g. contrast niruthógaitsam ‘we have not deceived’ with a form of -ro-
immediately following the negative prefix ni- with nimthorgaith ‘it has not
deceived me’ with a reflex of -ro- separated from the negative by a lexical
prefix associated with the verb).  García-Castillero reasonably concludes, in
agreement with Russell (2005), that such facts are evidence that the “Glosses
represent a rather spontaneous linguistic production, with little or no
literary intention on the part of the Old Irish glossators” (p. 15).  Chapter
1 continues with a very clear discussion of the morass of Old Irish
orthography and it concludes with a presentation of clause typing and its
reality as a grammatical category.  Clause typing is defined as “the
grammatical expression of illocutionary force” (p. 22), which itself “is part
of the pragmatic component of the language and corresponds to the intention of
the speaker to modify the addressee(s) behavior and/or cognitive situation
when the former presents some propositional content” (p. 21). 
García-Castillero distinguishes six clause types in Old Irish: declarative,
relative wh-interrogative, polar interrogative, responsive, and imperative;
each is the centerpiece of its own chapter in Part 2.

Chapter 2 is wholly devoted to laying out the blueprint of the Old Irish
verbal complex.  As opposed to other Indo-European languages whose verbal
complex generally consists of just the verbal stem and the inflectional
endings, García-Castillero argues that the Old Irish verbal complex
additionally contains markers of clause typing.  This complex, he maintains,
consists of six templatic slots, which to some degree are reminiscent of
similar templatic structures proposed for Athabaskan verbs such as Navajo
(Hale 2001).  Of the six slots, the fourth and fifth are mandatory, consisting
of the verbal stem and the inflectional endings respectively.  The second slot
and the sixth slot are both locations for object affixes, while the first slot
houses ‘conjunct particles’ such as in (introduces yes/no questions) or ní
(negation).  When the first slot is empty, lexical preverbs (e.g. do- in
do-beir- ‘give, bring’ from beir- ‘carry, bear’) fall there, otherwise they
are relegated to the third slot.  The main phonological impetus for treating
the verbal complex as a single unit is its being isomorphic with the
corresponding stress unit.  Stress always falls on the first element after the
second slot, be it a lexical preverb in the third slot or absent that, the
verbal stem in the fourth slot.  

There are both phonological and morphological phenomena which appear to be
reflexes of clause typing.  The main phonological effect is the mutation on
the initial consonant of the stressed element of the verbal complex in
relative clauses.  This consonant is liable to undergo lenition or
nasalization depending upon the gender and number of the antecedent on the one
hand, and the grammatical function of the antecedent’s correspondent in the
relative clause on the other.  As for morphological effects from clause
typing, negative clauses furnish such an example.   If the sentence is
declarative the marker of negation in the verbal complex is ní, if relative it
is nad, if relative but followed by an object affix in the second slot then it
is nach, if imperative it is na-, and if interrogative the occupant of the
first slot is innad.  Such variation, which is consistently dependent on
clause type, is also observed in the type of pronominal affixes which occur,
illuminating the use of what have traditionally been termed by Celticists the
Class A, B, and C infixed pronouns.  

The third and final chapter of the first part focuses on structures which
deviate from the canonical unmarked verb-initial (V1) word order of Old Irish.
 Two such constructions each involve the placement of a constituent before the
main verb.  Cleft-sentences place any phrasal constituent before the verb;
this constituent itself is preceded by the copula and is itself focused. 
Left-dislocations, on the hand, allow a noun phrase (NP) to appear sentence
initial immediately before the main verb.  The NP in such constructions most
often indicates the topic of the sentence, though less frequently it too can
be used for focus (p. 77 and 79).  García-Castillero uses both these
constructions in later chapters to account for specific diachronic
developments in certain clause types.

Chapter 3 concludes with a rich discussion of another set of non-canonical
orders in Old Irish which have received much attention in the literature:
tmesis and Bergin’s Law.  The former is the separation of the pretonic element
of a verbal complex (i.e. the first two slots) from the tonic element.  The
latter is the appearance of dependent forms of the verb when not in V1
position.  Such dependent forms are characterized in simple verbs by a unique
set of verbal endings (termed “conjunct endings” as opposed to “absolute
endings”) and in compound verbs by the stress falling on the first preverb as
opposed to immediately following the first preverb (termed “prototonic” forms
as opposed to “deuterotonic” forms).  Following Greene (1977) and Kelly
(1986), García-Castillero splits up tmesis into four types depending upon the
nature of the occupant of the pretonic position of the verbal complex (lexical
preverb v. conjunct particle) and when the sentence appears non-clause
initially, whether or not the clause is introduced by the copula. 
García-Castillero follows scholars such as MacCoisdealbha (1976), McCone
(2000), and Isaac (2003) in maintaining that these tmesis/Bergin’s Law
constructions are artificial constructs which do not represent Archaic Irish
syntax, as contra Russell (2005) and Eska (2007, 2008).  As such,
García-Castillero leaves such constructions out of discussion in the remainder
of his study. 

Part II consists of four chapters which take the six clause types in turn,
offering a formal analysis of each.  Chapter 4 targets positive declarative
and relative clause types, dissecting the different morphological means which
mark both.  With respect to inflection, simple verbs (i.e. verbs without a
lexical prefix) take the absolute endings in both clause types aside from the
1st pl. and 3rd sg. and pl. which have unique relative desinences in relative
clauses.  Compound verbs (i.e. verbs with at least one lexical prefix), on the
other hand, take the conjunct endings in both clause types.  The relative
clause type, however, regardless of whether the verb is simple or compound, is
differentiated from the positive declarative type by two other means.  In
relative clauses the onset of the stressed element of the verbal complex is
subjected to lenition or nasalization if it is a phonological target for
either mutation.  Additionally, when an object affix is part of the verbal
complex, a unique type of pronominal object infixes, termed Class C, is used
in positive relative clauses as opposed to the use of either suffixal
pronominal objects or a different type of infixes (Classes A/B) in a positive
declarative verbal complex.  García-Castillero links the lack of unique
relative endings for the non-3rd person (aside from the 1st pl.) to the fact
“that the verbal complexes that have a 1st or 2nd person are less prone to
appear in restrictive relative clauses” (p. 147).  As such, they appear more
declarative-clause like.  He finds support for this in the occasional
appearance of Class A/B object infixes of 1st and 2nd person objects in
relative clauses instead of Class C pronouns.

Chapter 5 delves into subordination, delineating the type and context for each
of its five main types and subtypes (p. 151).  Declarative and relative clause
types stand on both ends of the continuum ranging from more to less
main-clause-like.  Two examples of more main-clause-like subordinate phrases
are those with no subordinating conjunction and those with a left-dislocated
topic.  Since left-dislocation is not possible in relative clauses, it is
understandable that relative verbal forms would not be used in such
subordinate clauses.  Examples of less main-clause-like subordinate clauses
are adverbial clauses.  Such clauses do take relative morphology;
specifically, that of nasalizing relative clauses.

Wh-interrogatives are presented in Chapter 6.  García-Castillero methodically
goes through all the permutations of the Old Irish wh-elements, including
whether the wh-element is stressed or unstressed, whether it is prenominal,
preverbal, or pre-pronominal, and whether the wh-element represents a direct
case (nominative or accusative) or an oblique one.  The declarative verbal
clause type is excluded from wh-interrogatives in favor of relative clause
typing which itself varies depending on the factors mentioned above.  For
instance, in preverbal wh-interrogatives, relative verbal forms are employed
when the wh-element is stressed while dependent forms alone (i.e. conjunct
endings in simple verbs and prototonic forms in compound verbs) with no
concomitant relative mutations when the wh-element is not stressed.  

Wh-interrogative clauses share with declarative and relative ones their
ability to appear in either of the two pragmatically marked constructions:
clefts and right-dislocation.  Chapter 7 groups together the three remaining
clause types which are generally united by their inability to appear in such
constructions: polar interrogatives, responsives, and imperatives. 
García-Castillero maintains that these three types “mainly focus on the verbal
predicate itself.”  He argues that nominal and pronominal references play a
secondary role in all three, being completely excluded from responsives in
fact, which ⎯ as the name suggests ⎯ are used to respond to a yes/no-question
(Watkins 1963 for the terminology) and also in some type of ‘emotional reflex’
following imperatives (Draak 1952).  All three clause types take conjunct
endings (aside from the 2nd and 3rd singulars of the imperative which have
unique endings), they bear no autonomous mutations not triggered by specific
particles, and compound verbs are regularly in the prototonic form, aside from
imperatives with an infixed pronoun.  Suffixed pronouns are excluded from all
three types, those instances which have been claimed to be imperative verbs
coupled with an object suffix are better taken as subjunctive forms or
corruptions in the text (Breatnach 1977).  In accounting for a few unexpected
occurrences of what appear to be responsives, García-Castillero makes the
interesting proposal that whereas imperative and polar interrogatives are
effectively clause types of initiation, as seen in their uses as conditional
protases, the responsive is a reactive clause type, which can therefore also
be used as the apodosis of a conditional sentence (p. 225-6).

The third and final part of the book consists of three chapters which are
effectively devoted to the morphological paradigms of the various clause
types.  Chapter 8 goes through each clause type in turn, concluding that “the
marking of clause typing predominantly appears at the edges of the Old Irish
verbal complex” (p. 259) and that polarity and person show the highest degree
of interaction with clause typing.  Polarity is indicated by negative conjunct
particles which occupy slot 1.  Person, on the other hand, is indicated via
subject inflectional endings in slot 5 and object affixes in either slots 2 or
6.  Certain gaps in the paradigms, which he clearly lays out, have natural
explanations which go beyond Old Irish. To take but one example, there is no
negative wh-interrogative particle or string.  Such a combination is
cross-linguistically rare (Erteschik-Shir 1992) and another V1 language, the
Australian language Wanyi, has a similar restriction (Laughren, Pensalfini,
and Mylne 2005).  

Chapter 9 spotlights the suppletive distribution of the present forms of the
copula and substantive verb according to clause typing.  His thorough
descriptive treatment is littered with interesting diachronic asides.  One
such is how precisely ‘fil’, which is etymologically related to Middle Welsh
gwelet ‘to see’ (Schumacher 2004: 669-675, Rix et al. 2001: 675), became a
relative form.  García-Castillero assumes that its development into an
expression of locative predicates originated in negative and interrogative
clauses.  He compares the English sentences ‘You don’t see the headings’ and
‘Do you see (the) headings?  Both can mean in the right context ‘There are no
headings’ and ‘Are there headings?  He maintains that the situation was
comparable in Old Irish, which, however, went a step further.  On analogy with
passive verbal forms whose conjunct forms ⎯ used, for instance, in negative
and interrogative sentences (e.g. ní·carthar ‘(s)he is not loved’, in·carthar
‘is (s)he loved’) ⎯ are identical to the positive relative forms (carthar ‘who
is loved’), ‘fil’ was likewise extended to positive relative function, which
is in fact its most frequent use in the glosses.  

Chapter 10 delves into personal pronouns, narrowing in and offering thoughts
on the origins of tonic pronouns in referential non-verbal predication and
affixal pronouns, bleached of their original meaning, subsuming the role of
aspect typing.  With respect to the former, a tonic pronoun is required in
constructions such as ‘X is Y’ when X is a pronoun.  García-Castillero
maintains that since the copula is not stressed and since non-verbal
predication discloses some sort of unexpected information, it is unsurprising
tonic pronouns are used in such predication.  He sees a strong parallel with
cleft-sentences and wh-questions.  What is curious, however, is that outside
of the 3rd pl, such tonic pronouns are required in this construction when
neither X nor Y are pronouns, resulting in the following literal translation:
‘Is it X Y.’  García-Castillero views this as an incomplete grammaticalization
since ‘it’ does agree in gender with one of the nouns in the construction. 
The second half of the chapter discusses the conditional and reiterative
functions of the infix -dL- and traces its emergence from an affixed pronoun. 
To illustrate the rise of the latter, García-Catillero starts from sentences
in which the infix has a clear nominal reference as in Würzburg 9c22, ‘you
forgive not the injury that is done to you, but you complain about it’. 
Examples like this then influenced the use of the infix pronoun in sentences
where it effectively referred to a verbal notion mentioned in a preceding
clause and not the objects of that verb as in Würzburg 26a20, ‘he will perform
false miracles and false signs, as wizards have done it through time’.  Such
blurring of the antecedent of a pronoun went one step further, in which the
pronoun simply came to mark the relationship of a verb to the preceding
context.  The veracity of this marking is proved by the fact that intransitive
verbs, which by their very nature do not have object arguments, came to take
the infix -dL- in such a sequential context.

A final short chapter summarizes the various conclusions reached in the book. 
The book is rounded out with a bibliography of primary and secondary sources
and a detailed index.

EVALUATION

This book is descriptively rich and offers the specialist or the neophyte
alike a deeper understanding and control of the Old Irish data.  It
effectively could serve as an appendix to Thurneysen (1946), offering a deeper
insight into specific constructions.  Only a few times does García-Castillero
break the mold of description and offer solutions to certain diachronic
puzzles.  His solutions to each seem reasonable or at least as convincing as
the ones he argues against.  The book is overwhelmingly descriptive in nature,
however, and does not make an attempt at offering a synchronic proposal
couched in modern syntactic or morphological theory accounting for the various
morphological pieces or processes tied to each clause type, as is done in
Arregi and Nevins 2012 description of the Basque auxiliaries.  This is in no
way a criticism, as this was simply not the book’s intent, and had it been,
its 397 pages would have ballooned to something perhaps double in size.

REFERENCES

Arregi, Karlos and Andrew Nevins.  2012.  Morphotactics: Basque auxiliaries
and the structure of spellout.  Dordrecht: Springer.

Breatnach, Liam.  1977.  “The suffix pronouns in Early Irish.  Celtica
12:75-107.

Draak, Maartje.  1952.  “Emotional reflexes,” Ériu  16:74-78.

Erteschik-Shir, Nomi.  1992.  “Focus structure and predication: the case of
negative wh-questions,” Belgian Journal of Linguistics7.1: 35-51.

Eska, Joseph. 2007. ‘Bergin’s Rule (Syntactic diachrony and discourse
strategy),’ Diachronica 24:253-278.

Eska, Joseph. 2008. ‘Grammars in Conflict. Phonological aspects of the
Bergin’s Rule construction,’ Keltische Forschungen 3: 45-62.

Greene, David. 1977. ‘Archaic Irish.’ In Karl Horst Schmidt and Rolf
Ködderitzsch (eds.), Indogermanisch und Keltisch, 11-33. Wiesbaden: Reichert.

Hale, Ken. 2001. ‘Navajo verb stem position and the bipartite structure of the
Navajo conjunct sector,’ Linguistic Inquiry 32.4: 678-693.

Isaac, Graham. 2003. ‘Prospects in Old Irish syntax,’ Zeitschrift für
celtische Philologie 53: 181-197.

Kelly, Fergus. 1986. ‘Two notes on final-verb constructions,’ Celtica 18:1-12.

Laughren, Mary, Rob Pensalfini, and Tom Mylne. 2005. “Accounting for
verb-initial order in an Australian language,” in (A. Carnie, H. Harley, and
S. Dooley (eds.), Verb First (On the Syntax of Verb Initial Languages),
367-401. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins.

MacCoisdealbha, Padraig. 1976. The Syntax of the Sentence in Old Irish
(Selected Studies from a Descriptive, Historical, and Comparative Point of
View.  Ph.D. dissertation, Ruhr-Universität Bochum. 

McCone, Kim (ed). 2000. Echtrae Chonnlai (and the Beginnings of Vernacular
Narrative Writing in Ireland: a Critical Edition with Introduction, Notes,
Bibliography and Vocabulary). Maynooth: Department of Old and Middle Irish,
National Univrsity of Ireland, Maynooth.

Rix, Helmut, Martin Kümmel, Thomas Zehnder, Reiner Lipp, and Brigitte
Schirmer.  2001.  Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben. Die Wurzeln und ihre
Primärstammbildungen2.  Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag.

Russell, Paul.  2005. ‘What was best of every language: the early history of
the Irish language.’ In Dáibhí Ó Cróinín (ed.), A New History of Ireland,
Volume 1: Prehistoric and Early Ireland, 405-450. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.

Schumacher, Stefan.  2004.  Die keltischen Primärverben (Ein vergleichendes,
etymologisches und morphologisches Lexicon), unter Mitarbeit von Britta
Schulze-Thulin und Caroline aan de Wiel.  Innsbruck: Innsbrücker Beiträge zur
Sprachwissenschaft.

Thurneysen, Rudolf.  1946.  A grammar of Old Irish.  Revised and enlarged
edition. Translated from the German by Daniel A. Binchy and Osborn Bergin.
Dublin: Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies.

Watkins, Calvert.  1963.  “Preliminaries to a historical and comparative
analysis of the syntax of the Old Irish Verb,” Celtica 6: 1-49.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Jean-François Mondon is an Associate Professor of World Languages at Minot
State University whose research interests are historical linguistics,
morphological theory, and language pedagogy.





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