Coordination and verbal nouns in subordinate clauses in Early Modern Welsh Biblical texts

Authors

  • Erich Poppe University of Marburg

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18148/hs/2022.v6i4-11.94

Keywords:

Early Modern Welsh, subordinate clauses, coordination patterns

Abstract

This paper focusses on uses of finite and nonfinite verb forms in Early Modern Welsh subordinate clauses in which two or more verbal events are coordinated. In such clauses, three different constructions are already attested in Middle Welsh; one of these was described as the norm in the language of sixteenth-century Welsh Biblical texts by a nineteenth-century grammarian, Thomas Jones Hughes. On the basis of a micro-study of data from these texts, the paper will review his claim and survey the distribution of the relevant syntactic patterns, thereby assessing the potential of the coordination of verbal events in subordinate clauses as a promising area of research in historical syntax and typological linguistics. Based on a comparison of Welsh, Hebrew, and Greek parallel passages, it argues that translational equivalents can be seen to exist specifically between a Welsh construction with a nonfinite form in the second coordinand and formally different constructions in the Hebrew and Greek source texts.

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Published

2022-06-27