TY - CHAP A1 - Kirk, John M. A1 - Kallen, Jeffrey L. T1 - Assessing Celticity in a corpus of Irish Standard English N2 - Conventional wisdom since the earliest studies of Irish English has attributed much of what is distinctive about this variety to the influence of the Irish language. From the early philologists (Joyce 1910, van Hamel 1912) through the classic works of Henry (1957, 1958) and Bliss (1979) down to present-day linguistic orientations (e.g. Corrigan 2000 a, Filppula 1999, Fiess 2000, Hickey 2000, Todd 1999, and others), the question of Irish-language influence may be disputed on points of detail, but remains a central focus for most studies in the field. It is not our intention to argue with this consensus, nor to examine specific points of grammar in detail, but, rather, to suggest an approach to this question which (a) takes for its empirical base a sample of the standard language, rather than dialectal material or the sample sentences so beloved of many papers on the subject, and (b) understands Celticity not just in terms of the formal transfer of grammatical features, but as an indexical feature of language use, i.e. one in which English in Ireland is used in such a way as to point to the Irish language as a linguistic and cultural reference point. In this sense, our understanding of Celticity is not entirely grammatical, but relies as well on Pierce’s notion of indexicality (see Greenlee 1973), by which semiotic signs ‘point to’ other signs. Our focus in assessing Celticity, then, derives in the first instance from an examination of the International Corpus of English (ICE). We have recently completed the publication of the Irish component of ICE (ICE-Ireland), a machinereadable corpus of over 1 million words of speech and writing gathered from a range of contexts determined by the protocols of the global International Corpus of English project. The international nature of this corpus project makes for ready comparisons with other varieties of English, and in this paper we will focus on comparisons with the British corpus, ICE-GB. For references on ICE generally, see Greenbaum 1996; for ICE-GB, see especially Nelson, Wallis and Aarts 2002; and for ICE-Ireland, see papers such as Kirk, Kallen, Lowry & Rooney (2003), Kirk & Kallen (2005), and Kallen & Kirk (2007). Our first approach will be to look for signs of overt Celticity in those grammatical features of Irish English which have been put forward as evidence of Celtic transfer (or of the reinforcement between Celtic and non-Celtic historical sources); our second approach will be to look at non-grammatical ways in which texts in ICEIreland become indexical of Celticity by less structural means such as loanwords, code-switching, and covert reference using ‘standard’ English in ways that are specific to Irish usage. We argue that, at least within the standard language as we have observed it, Celticity is at once less obvious than a reading of the dialectal literature might suggest and, at the same time, more pervasive than a purely grammatical approach would imply. Y1 - 2007 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19349 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Isaac, Graham R. T1 - Celtic and Afro-Asiatic N2 - Extract: [...]It is not remarkable that structural similarities between the Insular Celtic and some Afro-Asiatic1 languages continue to exert a fascination on many people. Research into any language may be enlightening with regard to the understanding of all languages, and languages that show similar features are particularly likely to provide useful information. It is remarkable that the structural similarities between Insular Celtic and Afro-Asiatic languages continue to be interpreted as diagnostic of some sort of special relationship between them; some sort of affinity or mutual affiliation that goes beyond the fact that they are two groups of human languages. This paper investigates again the fallacious nature of the arguments for the Afro-Asiatic/Insular Celtic contact theory (henceforth AA/IC contact theory). It takes its point of departure from Gensler (1993). That work is as yet unpublished, but has had considerable resonance. Such statements as the following indicate the importance that has been attached to the work: “After the studies of Morris-Jones, Pokorny, Wagner2 and Gensler it seems impossible to deny the special links between Insular Celtic and Afro-Asiatic” (Jongeling 2000:64). And the ideas in question have been propagated in the popular scientific press,3 with the usual corollary that it is these ideas that are perceived by the interested but non-specialist public as being at the cutting edge of sound new research, when in fact they may simply be recycled ideas of a discredited theory. For these reasons it is appropriate to subject Gensler’s unpublished work to detailed critique.4 In particular, with regard to the twenty features of affinity between Insular Celtic and Afro-Asiatic which Gensler investigated, it will be shown (yet again, in some cases): [...] Y1 - 2007 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19209 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Selkirk, Elisabeth T1 - Contrastive focus, givenness and the unmarked status of “Discourse-New” N2 - New evidence is provided for a grammatical principle that singles out contrastive focus (Rooth 1996; Truckenbrodt 1995) and distinguishes it from discourse-new “informational” focus. Since the prosody of discourse-given constituents may also be distinguished from discourse-new, a three-way distinction in representation is motivated. It is assumed that an F-feature marks just contrastive focus (Jackendoff 1972, Rooth 1992), and that a G-feature marks discoursegiven constituents (Féry and Samek-Lodovici 2006), while discoursenew is unmarked. A crucial argument for G-marking comes from second occurrence focus (SOF) prosody, which arguably derives from a syntactic representation where SOF is both F-marked and G-marked. This analysis relies on a new G-Marking Condition specifying that a contrastive focus may be G-marked only if the focus semantic value of its scope is discourse-given, i.e. only if the contrast itself is given. KW - contrastive focus KW - givenness KW - second occurrence focus KW - F-marking KW - G-marking KW - prosody Y1 - 2007 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19670 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Stüber, Karin T1 - Effects of Language Contact on Roman and Gaulish Personal Names N2 - Extract: [...]The Roman conquest of what was to become the province of Gallia Narbonensis in the second and then of the whole of Transalpine Gaul in the first century B.C. led to the incorporation into the Roman empire of a large part of the territory in which Gaulish was then spoken.1 In consequence, the vernacular rapidly lost its footing at least in public life and was soon replaced by Latin, the language of the new masters, which enjoyed higher prestige (cf. e.g. Meid 1980: 7-8). On the other hand, Gaulish continued to be written for some three centuries and was probably used in speech even longer, especially in rural areas. We must therefore posit a prolonged period of bilingualism. The effects of this situation on the Latin spoken in the provinces of Gaul seem to have been rather limited. A number of lexical items, mostly from the field of everyday life, and some phonetic characteristics are the sole testimonies of a Gaulish substratum in the variety of Latin that was later to develop into the Romance dialects of France (cf. Meid 1980: 38, fn. 77). [...] Y1 - 2007 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19215 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Matasović, Ranko T1 - Insular Celtic as a language area N2 - Contents: The Sociolinguistic Conditions favourable to spread of Structural Features Contact-induced Changes in Insular Celtic Phonological Changes The Lenition of Voiceless Stops Raising / i-Affection Lowering / a-Affection Apocope Syncope Morphological The Loss of Case Inflection of Personal Pronouns The Creation of the Equative Degree The Creation of the Imperfect Tense The Creation of the Conditional Mood Morphosyntactic and Syntactic The Creation of Preposed Definite Articles Y1 - 2007 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19224 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Wolf, Göran T1 - Language contact, change of language status : ‘Celtic’ national languages in the British Isles and Ireland N2 - Contents: Conceptual Clarifications Contact Situations – a Brief Outline Under Scrutiny I: Cornwall, Isle of Man and Scotland Under scrutiny II: Wales Under Scrutiny III: Ireland – a Lengthy Discourse Y1 - 2007 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19361 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - German, Gary T1 - Language shift, Diglossia and dialectal variation in Western Brittany : the case of Southern Cornouaille N2 - Extract: [...]In the first part of this paper I trace the language shift from Breton to French within the historical, social and ideological framework in which it occurred. I then argue that 19th and 20th-century attempts by scholars and militants to rehabilitate the Breton language led to the creation of a unified standard (peurunvan).2 The consequence has been the rise of a three-way diglossic rapport between the speakers of French, the new Breton standard3 and those of the traditional Breton vernaculars. Taking the varieties of southern Cornouaille (Finistère) between Quimper and Quimperlé as a point of comparison,4 I focus on a number of phonological, morphological, syntactical and lexical features which, though far from exhausttive, are not generally taken into account in the new standard language. These details provide a general idea of how varieties of Breton function at the micro-dialectological level, as well as ways in which they can differ from the standard and other spoken varieties. The paper concludes with observations regarding the necessity to consider languages, language varieties and their speakers within relevant social contexts.[...] Y1 - 2007 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19264 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Ó Béarra, Feargal T1 - Late Modern Irish and the Dynamics of Language Change and Language Death N2 - Contents: Definition of Late Modern Irish Lexical and Syntactic Equivalence The Official Languages Act and the Translation Industry Dynamics of Language Change and Language Death Lack of Exposure and Critical Mass Y1 - 2007 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19331 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Mikhailova, Tatyana A. T1 - Macc, Cailín and Céile – an Altaic element in Celtic? N2 - Extract: [...]In Celtic languages (both Continental and Insular) we can find words with uncertain etymology which presumably represent loanwords from other language-families. One can see the traces of the pre-Indo-European substratum of Central and Western Europe, “an original non-Celtic/non-Germanic North West block” according to Kuhn (1961). But we may suppose that this conclusion is not sufficiently justified. This problem can have many different solutions, and we may never be in a position to resolve it definitively.[...] Y1 - 2007 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19197 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Hartmann, Katharina A1 - Zimmermann, Malte T1 - Morphological focus marking in Gùrùntùm (West Chadic) N2 - The paper presents an in-depth study of focus marking in Gùrùntùm, a West Chadic language spoken in Bauchi Province of Northern Nigeria. Focus in Gùrùntùm is marked morphologically by means of a focus marker a, which typically precedes the focus constituent. Even though the morphological focus-marking system of Gùrùntùm allows for a lot of fine-grained distinctions in information structure (IS) in principle, the language is not entirely free of focus ambiguities that arise as the result of conflicting IS- and syntactic requirements that govern the placement of focus markers. We show that morphological focus marking with a applies across different types of focus, such as newinformation, contrastive, selective and corrective focus, and that a does not have a second function as a perfectivity marker, as is assumed in the literature. In contrast, we show at the end of the paper that a can also function as a foregrounding device at the level of discourse structure. KW - morphological focus marking KW - focus ambiguity KW - focus types KW - foregrounding Y1 - 2006 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19525 ER -