Temporal Deixis in Welsh and Breton (review)

This volume is a 1998 Universität Potsdam dissertation whose goal is to identify and describe the means by which Welsh and Breton, two members of the Brittonic branch of the Celtic language family, express their systems of time and aspectuality. Though they are closely related genetically, Welsh and Breton are typologically quite different in these sectors of their grammars as a result of close contact with English and French, respectively, as dominant languages.

After a brief introduction (1–8) and a long, critical rehearsal of previous work by Hans Reichenbach, William E. Bull, Harold Weinrich, Bernard Comrie, Östen Dahl, Hans Jürgen Sasse, Walter Breu, and Wolfgang Klein on tense and aspect (9–93), Heinecke refrains from adopting the approach of any of those named because, he says, none is language-independent, i.e. not based on any individual language, the implication being that this would necessarily distort the analysis of a language for which the approach was not specifically developed. He adopts, instead, a slightly modified version of work by Klaus Heger which draws a sharp distinction between form and function, an approach which requires that ‘concepts’ rather than ‘forms’ be the object of comparison between languages; thus extra-linguistic ‘concepts’ such as temporal states, e.g. present time, and aspects, e.g. imperfectivity, must be rigorously distinguished from linguistic ‘forms’ such as tense, e.g. present tense, and aspectual exponents, e.g. the Welsh imperfective marker yn. This approach is illustrated with data principally from Arabic, French, and Russian (95–122).

Following a brief and dated description of the composition and history of the Celtic language family (123–49), much of which is not germane to the subject of the volume, H turns to thorough descriptions of time and aspectuality in Welsh (151–216) and Breton (217–56). These sections are rich in data and, to my mind, are the most valuable portion of the book. The final section of the volume then compares the data presented in the previous two (257–74). H finds that while there are some typological similarities between the distinct systems of time and aspectuality in the two languages, e.g. the existence of a single obligatory exponent for imperfective aspect [W yn, Br. o(c’h)], there also are clear differences, e.g. Welsh uses only prepositions (which can be combined to some degree) to mark temporal distinctions, while Breton mostly employs participial or auxiliary forms. Such differences lead H to argue that the interference from English and French on Welsh and Breton, respectively, has substantially attenuated their genetic link, a proposal which must bear further scrutiny, e.g. on other aspects of grammar, before many specialists would be willing to accept it.

Unfortunately, I must report that the text would have much benefited from an additional round of proofreading, for there are a number of instances in which the English is, at least, obscure, and the punctuation is highly—and distractingly—variable in its use.