Elliott Lash

University of Göttingen | GAUG · Department of Linguistics

This article introduces Corpus PalaeoHibernicum (CorPH), a corpus currently consisting of 78 texts in Early Irish (c. 7th–10th cent.) created by the ERC-funded Chronologicon Hibernicum ( ChronHib ) project by bringing together pre-existing lexical and syntactic databases and adding further crucial texts from the period. In addition to being annotat...

This article is concerned with some fine‐grained distinctions in the syntax of subjects in Old Irish. Old Irish (7th–9th century) is typically described as a VSO language, but there are a number of sentences in the corpus in which the subject is not immediately after the subject. In this paper two case studies are conducted the results of which sho...

This paper introduces the ongoing ERC-funded project Chronologicon Hibernicum, which studies the diachronic developments of the Irish language between c. 550–950, and aims at refining the absolute chronology of these developments. It presents firstly the project organization, its subject matter and objective, then gives an overview of the potential...

This paper examines subject-verb agreement in Early-Irish sentences with coordinate subjects. We claim that Early Irish (Old and Middle Irish) is a Variable agreement' language, which exhibits both singular and plural agreement with coordinate subjects. The type of agreement depends on adjacency between subject and verb and the valency of the vert)...

This article reconstructs the syntax of pre-Old Irish copular clauses using relic or anomalous formations within Old Irish. It is therefore an exercise in syntactic internal reconstruction. The two patterns that are reconstructed are (a) the word order of subject and predicate, which was Predicate Subject in Old Irish but is argued to have been Sub...

The words etar and ceta have a first syllable with a variable vowel: either e (e-variant) or i (i-variant). This paper investigates the diachronic distribut ion of these two variants. The innovation of the i-variants occurred by the eighth century at the latest in 'pretonic complexes': preverbal and prenom inal proclitic strings consisting of more...

I argue that Old and Middle Irish (spoken: 7th-12th c.) had two subject positions: subject-1 and subject-2, as well as the post-posed position, identified by Mac Giolla Easpaig (1980). I use the presence of demarcating adverbs (e.g. danó ‘also’, íarum ‘then’, trá ‘so’, didiu ‘moreover’, etc.) to distinguish these two positions. It is shown that all...

This chapter is a case study in syntactic reanalysis leading to grammaticalization. It investigates the history of Modern Irish comparative particle ná 'than', and shows how it has developed phonologically, morphologically, and syntactically from an Old Irish phrase ol/ind daäs 'beyond how it is'. Two reanalyses are proposed: first, the verb daäs i...

This article discusses similar developments in the expression of negation in the histories of Egyptian-Coptic and Arabic and explores the evidence for these respective developments being related by language contact. Both Coptic and Arabic have undergone a development known as Jespersen's Cycle (JC), whereby an original negative marker is joined by...

One of the principal challenges of historical linguistics is to explain the causes of language change. Any such explanation, however, must also address the ‘actuation problem’: why is it that changes occurring in a given language at a certain time cannot be reliably predicted to recur in other languages, under apparently similar conditions? The six...