Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Long head movement in Breton
- 2 Some syntactic effects of suppletion in the Celtic copulas
- 3 Fronting constructions in Welsh
- 4 Bod in the present tense and in other tenses
- 5 Pronominal enclisis in VSO languages
- 6 Aspect, agreement and measure phrases in Scottish Gaelic
- 7 A minimalist approach to some problems of Irish word order
- 8 Subjects and subject positions in Irish
- 9 Negation in Irish and the representation of monotone decreasing quantifiers
- 10 On structural invariance and lexical diversity in VSO languages: arguments from Irish noun phrases
- References
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Long head movement in Breton
- 2 Some syntactic effects of suppletion in the Celtic copulas
- 3 Fronting constructions in Welsh
- 4 Bod in the present tense and in other tenses
- 5 Pronominal enclisis in VSO languages
- 6 Aspect, agreement and measure phrases in Scottish Gaelic
- 7 A minimalist approach to some problems of Irish word order
- 8 Subjects and subject positions in Irish
- 9 Negation in Irish and the representation of monotone decreasing quantifiers
- 10 On structural invariance and lexical diversity in VSO languages: arguments from Irish noun phrases
- References
- Index
Summary
Preliminary remarks
This book grew out of a conference on Comparative Celtic Syntax held at the University of Wales, Bangor, on 25–7 June 1992. Earlier versions of seven of the ten chapters collected here were given at that conference. The idea behind the conference was to bring together researchers working on the syntax of the Celtic languages from a ‘principles-and-parameters’ perspective (the assumptions behind this perspective are outlined below in section 2.1), and, in particular, to provide a forum where comparative work on Celtic syntax could be presented. The comparative work was intended to be both internal and external to the Celtic family. Hence, one goal of the conference was to encourage those working on Celtic to make comparisons with non-Celtic languages, and to bring relevant phenomena and analyses of Celtic languages to the attention of those working on non-Celtic languages. Although the precise contents differ from the conference, and this volume should not be taken as a conference proceedings, we have compiled this collection with the same general goals in mind.
This introduction is intended to provide the background to the chapters that follow, both for those who are unfamiliar with the principles-and-parameters framework and for those who are unfamiliar with the Celtic languages. In this section, we briefly sketch the historical, geographical and social situation of the languages. Section 2 provides background to the principles-and-parameters framework. This section is of most relevance for readers who may be familiar with the languages but who are less familiar with this framework.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Syntax of the Celtic LanguagesA Comparative Perspective, pp. 1 - 52Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996