Poppe, Erich, “Y’r bordeu yd aethant: locative adverbs in Middle Welsh prose, their placement and pragmatics”, Journal of Celtic Linguistics 14 (2012): 31–66.
- journal article
This paper examines the placement of obligatory adverbial phrases in positive main clauses in Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi, in the first part (Y Keis) of Ystoryaeu Seint Greal, and in Ystorya Bown o Hamtwn in which a third singular or plural form of mynet is combined with a locative phrase containing the preposition y or at. Within the individual texts, considerable positional variation occurs, but this variation can be shown to be explicable in terms of a contextual and pragmatic analysis. The comparison of the positional patterns and their narrative uses in the three texts shows a striking stability of the pragmatic principle for the placement of constituents in positive main clauses in the language of Middle Welsh prose – even if, as it may be the case in a few examples from Ystorya Bown, the syntactic choices of the Middle Welsh translator have been influenced by his Anglo-Norman source. Finally, some promising paths for future research are delineated.
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