English and Celtic in contact (review)

This book offers a painstaking presentation and evaluation of the evidence that has been claimed as relevant to the question of how great the influence of Celtic (C) on English (E) has been over a period of some 1,500 years. After a brief introduction, the authors present two large balanced sections, one dealing with 'early' influences and the other with influences 'in the modern age'. The shorter 'epilogue' consists of a chapter on the history of scholarship in this area (which is in many ways a recap of major themes in the earlier sections), a chapter 'reassessing' the evidence for C influence on E from both demographic and theoretical (including typological and sociolinguistic) perspectives, and a short conclusion. The apparatus consists of a rather small set of footnotes, a bibliography, a cited-author index, and a subject index.

The authors, already well known individually for their original work on C-influenced varieties of E (e.g. Filppula 1999, Klemola 2000, Filppula et al. 2002, Paulasto 2006), are well informed both theoretically and philologically. Scholars should turn to this book as a valuable, sophisticated, and comprehensive account of the strongest relevant evidence. At one level, saying that is a sufficient appraisal of the book. If it consisted only of Part 2 and the epilogue, it would be largely uncontroversial. There is overwhelming formal evidence for the impact of the C languages on regional Englishes at all linguistic levels, and this is supported by a range of well-known sociolinguistic considerations. But there is a monster in the room provided by Part 1, and I concentrate on the issues that are raised in that part. The book has a rhetorical structure through which the undoubted plausibility of the claims made in Part 2 may stiffen the reader's attitude in favor of the more controversial material in Part 1, especially when reinforced by the recap in the epilogue.

Part 1 covers the period from the earliest known contacts (encompassing the end of the period of Roman rule in Britain, c. 350-450) to approximately the Tudor period (1485-1603), with some reflection on modern dialect features that have stayed outside of the developing standard language and are, or may be, presumed to be early, in some sense. The great unresolved issue of this period is whether any of the long-recorded formal characteristics of E, especially those of the standard dialect, can be ascribed to contact with C. The traditional view notes the extreme paucity of C lexical borrowings into E and, at its crudest, infers from it that meaningful contact was negligible, at least in the earlier part of this period before the rate of the Anglo-Saxon westward advance slowed down. During the twentieth century, some voices were raised proposing that some syntactic features of E invited comparison with C languages individually or collectively (e.g. the cleft construction, do-periphrasis, and the decline of the external possessor construction) and suggested a historical connection irrespective of the lexical evidence. More recently some evidence has been adduced from morphosyntax (e.g. the so-called Northern Subject Rule). The authors rehearse this intellectual history meticulously. The importance of the book is due to the position that it occupies in the growing wave of interest, since Poussa's work of 1990 onward, in the prehistory of E in its C context, which has generated a wealth of new data claimed to speak in favor of important effects of early contact. A state-of-the-art report right now is timely.

The general problem with Part 1 can be summed up in a kind of syllogistic schema. There are a number of propositions, each of which is illustrated by a range of data. First, there are those that suggest there is something to explain: E is in many respects a structurally atypical (West) Germanic language. Second, there are those that suggest that the reasons may lie in C: C languages display many of the divergent features that...