The Syntax of Welsh (Cambridge Syntax Guides) by Robert D. Borsley

Cambridge Syntax Guides

by Robert D. Borsley

Welsh, like the other Celtic languages, is best known amongst linguists for its verb-initial word order and its use of initial consonant mutations. However it has many more characteristics which are of interest to syntacticians. This book, first published in 2007, provides a concise and accessible overview of the major syntactic phenomena of Welsh. A broad variety of topics are covered, including finite and infinitival clauses, noun phrases, agreement and tense, word order, clause structure, dialect variation, and the language's historical Celtic background. Drawing on work carried out in both Principles and Parameters theory and Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, it takes contemporary colloquial Welsh as its starting point and draws contrasts with a range of literary and dialectal forms of the language, as well as earlier forms (Middle Welsh) were appropriate. An engaging guide to all that is interesting about Welsh syntax, this book will be welcomed by syntactic theorists, typologists, historical linguists and Celticists alike.

Paperback Bunko

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

See also Robert Borsley.

Robert D. Borsley, University of Essex and Bangor University
Robert D. Borsley is Professor Emeritus, at the University of Essex, where he worked from 2000 to 2017, and an Honorary Professor at Bangor University, where he worked from 1986 to 2000. He worked previously in University College Dublin, the IBM UK Scientific Centre, Winchester, University College London, the West London Institute of Higher Education, and Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland. He did his PhD at the University of Edinburgh, and his first degree at Bangor University.

His main research interests are in syntactic theory, and he has published extensively on the syntax of English and Welsh, and on other languages, including Breton, Polish, and Arabic. He has worked mainly within the HPSG framework and has made a variety of contributions to its development. In the late 1980s, he did some work on computational grammars as a visiting scientist at the IBM UK Scientific Centre in Winchester, and in the late 1990s he did some work on the acquisition of Welsh syntax. He has published eight books on syntax, most recently Welsh Negation and Grammatical Theory with Bob Morris Jones (University of Wales Press, 2005), The Syntax of Welsh with Maggie Tallerman and David Willis (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Nontransformational Syntax: Formal and Explicit Models of Grammar with Kersti Börjars of the University of Manchester. He was also an editor of Journal of Linguistics from 1994 to 2016.