The Syntax of the Celtic Languages: A Comparative Perspective

Leading researchers examine the Celtic languages in comparative perspective, making reference to European and Arabic languages; they use the insights of principles-and-parameters theory. A substantial introduction makes the volume accessible to theoreticians unfamiliar with the Celtic languages and to specialists. The book makes a strong contribution to linguistic theory and to our understanding of the Celtic languages.

• Full coverage of living Celtic languages • Leading specialists in the field • Compares Celtic with a range of non-Celtic languages

Introduction Robert D. Borsley and Ian Roberts; 1. Long head movement in Breton Robert D. Borsley, Maria-Luisa Rivero and Janig Stephens; 2. Some syntactic effects of suppletion in the Celtic copulas Randall Hendrick; 3. Fronting constructions in Welsh Maggie Tallerman; 4. Bod in the present tense and in other tenses Alain Rouveret; 5. Pronominal enclisis in VSO languages Ian Roberts and Ur Shlonsky; 6. Aspect, agreement and measure phrases in Scottish Gaelic David Adger; 7. A minimalist approach to some problems of Irish word order Jonathan David Bobaljik and Andrew Carnie; 8. Subjects and subject position in Irish James McCloskey; 9. Negation in Irish and the representation of monotone decreasing quantifiers Paolo Acquaviva; 10. On structural invariance and lexical diversity in VSO Languages: arguments from Irish noun phrases Nigel Duffield; References.