Syntactic Change in Welsh: A Study of the Loss of Verb-Second (review)

Surely the best known feature of Middle Welsh syntax is that V1 configurations are vanishingly rare in positive nonimperative matrix clauses, unlike the sparsely attested records of Old Welsh and all of Modern Welsh (with a few dialectal exceptions). Unfortunately, since the modern language was taken as the descriptive standard for Middle Welsh, noncleft clauses with other than V1 configurations have traditionally been labelled as exemplifying the ‘abnormal order’ even though they are ubiquitous in the language. Heretofore, most scholars who have examined the diachrony of Welsh configurational syntax have assumed that the abnormal order was never really a feature of vernacular Middle Welsh but an artifact exclusive to the literary language. I, too, subscribed to this view.

This volume, however, a revised version of a 1996 Oxford University dissertation, unequivocally establishes that the communis opinio is not correct. Positive nonimperative matrix clauses in Middle Welsh were configurationally V2 (embedded clauses were always V1, and negative nonimperative clauses were predominantly so). W’s detailed volume first provides a sensitive synchronic analysis of the clausal configurational syntax of Middle Welsh within a principles and parameters framework, demonstrating that, as in other V2 languages, a rule of topicalization was in operation which obligatorily raised a constituent to SpecCP; other preverbal constituents—which could only be adverbial—might occur in the surface configuration of a clause, but they were adjoined to CP. Those surface V1 clauses which did occur in Middle Welsh were merely special cases of the V2 parameter; virtually all such examples occur in the second of two conjoined clauses and other contexts of narrative continuity.

Having established the existence of a V2 parameter in the synchronic grammar of Middle Welsh, W’s second principal objective is to explain how this parameter was lost between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries. One of the great virtues of his analysis is the extensive use he makes of data drawn from personal letters, the documentation of legal proceedings, etc., closely dated sources which can be presumed to reflect vernacular usage more closely than literary works and which have rarely been drawn upon in studies of the diachronic syntax of the language. Wdemonstrates that during the Middle Welsh period phonological reduction of preverbal subject pronouns led to a number of exceptions to the V2 parameter. The topicalization of objects also declined during this period. Subsequent phonological erosion of preverbal particles further precipitated the loss of the V2 parameter, and by the second half of the sixteenth century V1 configurations had become quite common in the formal written language, competing with the SVO configuration—the residue of the V2 parameter—which was licensed by the 1588 translation of the Bible into Welsh. Informal written Welsh maintained its SVO configuration through the late eighteenth century when, according to W, it began to yield to V1 for reasons of economy in the computational part of the syntax.

Though completely persuaded by the two principal arguments of W’s well-documented study, there are a few points with which I would quibble. He employs data from early heroic poetic texts such as Canu Aneirin as evidence of Old Welsh usage even though the manuscripts date from the Middle Welsh period and the language is usually significantly different from texts which are recognized by all as Old Welsh. He also doubts the double base hypothesis of language variation leading to language change developed by Anthony Kroch and colleagues (45) while accepting Kroch’s constant rate hypothesis of variation leading to change (47) which, to my mind, are two facets of a single perspective (W later refers to the competition of forms in language change (261), a defining characteristic of the double base hypothesis). Such quibbles do not detract in any way from the importance of W’s overall conclusions, which have far-reaching consequences for the history of the Brittonic branch of the Celtic language family. Now we need to focus...