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In the Welsh language, constructions with nonfinite verb forms, traditionally called ‘verbal nouns’, are found frequently at all periods. Subjects of these forms can be marked in various ways. The frequency and distribution of certain subject markers differs drastically between Middle and Modern Welsh. Subject marking in Early Modern texts is highly variable, but has so far been little researched. This article presents a first micro-study analysing the distribution of different subject markers in nonfinite clauses in one text, Perl mewn Adfyd (1595), a religious treatise translated from English. Somewhat surprisingly, the data from this text already largely correspond to the Modern Welsh system, especially with regard to nonfinite adverbial and complement clauses. Taking into account examples from other texts, and including auxiliary constructions, formally less expected structures are tentatively related to semantic factors.

This paper focusses on uses of finite and nonfinite verb forms in Early Modern Welsh subordinate clauses in which two or more verbal events are coordinated. In such clauses, three different constructions are already attested in Middle Welsh; one of these was described as the norm in the language of sixteenth-century Welsh Biblical texts by a nineteenth-century grammarian, Thomas Jones Hughes. On the basis of a micro-study of data from these texts, the paper will review his claim and survey the distribution of the relevant syntactic patterns, thereby assessing the potential of the coordination of verbal events in subordinate clauses as a promising area of research in historical syntax and typological linguistics. Based on a comparison of Welsh, Hebrew, and Greek parallel passages, it argues that translational equivalents can be seen to exist specifically between a Welsh construction with a nonfinite form in the second coordinand and formally different constructions in the Hebrew and Greek source texts