Preface

Summary

Welsh has received a fraction of the attention from linguists that has been lavished on English and some other languages. However, it has been the object of generative research since the 1970s, and there is now a large and diverse body of generative research on Welsh syntax, assuming a number of different theoretical frameworks, and dealing with both synchronic and diachronic matters. In this book we outline what modern syntactic theory has said or can say about Welsh syntax and consider the kinds of issues which data from Welsh raise for syntactic theory. The book is not a reference grammar and we make no attempt to provide a completely comprehensive coverage of Welsh syntax. However, we consider a wide range of topics, and hope that we have dealt with most issues that syntacticians are likely to be interested in.

We draw extensively on the published literature, but we also go beyond it in various ways, offering both updated proposals and new analyses. Our work owes a great intellectual debt in particular to one of the pioneering works on Welsh syntax, Jones & Thomas (1977). Thirty years ago, that book tackled many of the important syntactic issues of the day from a generative standpoint. Since this is also one of our main aims, we feel that the current work has something in common with that earlier work; it may also in some sense stand as a replacement for it, since Jones & Thomas (1977) is now unfortunately out of print.

We hope that the book will be accessible in large part both to specialists in syntactic theory who are not familiar with Welsh (or any other Celtic language) and to specialists in Welsh who are not familiar with syntactic theory.