The Welsh Answering System (review)

This interesting study examines the elaborate system of responding of polar questions in Welsh, which is mixed in that it employes both echo and nonecho responsives. In the former, a portion of the interrogative, usually the finite verb, is repeated, while in the latter, a form equivalent to ‘yes’ or ‘no’ is used. After a useful cross-linguistic survey of responsive systems in Ch. 1 (1–51), Morris Jones describes the system of echo responsives in Welsh, which is sensitive to such verbal features as tense, aspect, number, and person as well as to semantic distinctions such as exclusive/inclusive, degree of intimacy, and genericness, in Ch. 2 (53–91). In this system, some degree of variation exists, such that the auxiliary gwneud ‘do’ can sometimes be substituted for a lexical verb (in Northern Welsh this option has been greatly extended so that lexical verbs are used as responsives only in emphatic contexts), while morphologically irregular lexical verbs allow free variation in usage, and some auxiliaries exlude its usage altogether. It is not surprising to find, then, that further complications arise when bod ‘be’ is the finite verb in the interrogative. Ch. 3 (93–127) treats the distribution of echo vs. non–echo responsives in usage: Broadly speaking, the former are employed, when permissible, in verb-initial configurations, and the latter in others.

Ch. 4 (129–46) examines other discourse functions for which responsives can—other options exist—serve; among these are agreements/disagreements with statements and commands, as discourse particles in conversation, acknowledgements, and corrections. Ch. 5 (147–97) leaves description behind and examines the formal syntax of responsives. MJ proposes that responsives and clauses with deleted VPs (recoverable from discourse context) are structurally identical. He is careful to point out that there are a number of differences between the two, e.g. they employ different negators, responsives never have an overt subject, while VP-deleted clauses may, and responsives always, have a nonecho form in the perfect tense (and so are formally different from VP-deleted clauses), but he accounts for these differences by positing that they bear different feature specifications in comp. All of the foregoing leads up to the real focus of the volume in the final three chapters, the use of the responsive system in the language of children, a field in which MJ has done considerable work.

Ch. 6 (199–238) investigates whether children adhere to the expected adult usage. Given the strong contact with English throughout Wales, it is not surprising that MJ finds that the responsive system is losing much of its complexity and that nonecho responsives are forcefully encroaching upon the domain of echo forms. Ch. 7 (239–75) examines the evidence for the influence of English in detail; it appears to be confirmed by the fact that 3- to 4-year-old L1 Welsh speakers generally adhere to the adult usage of responsives more closely (though not identically) than do 5- to 7-year-olds. (In this connection, given the complexity of the Welsh responsive system, it would be interesting to have information on the age that monolingual Welsh children not subject to interference from English fully acquire the system, but this is no longer possible.)

Ch. 8 (277–301), examines possible language-internal causes of variation in children’s usage of responsives and then summarizes the entire volume.

One of the fine features of this volume is that it makes much use of Welsh dialect data; on the other hand, one wishes that MJ had made less use of examples of his own devising, though I did not find this to be a detriment to the volume.