Old Irish Tonic Pronouns as Extraclausal Constituents
2013; Royal Irish Academy; Volume: 63; Issue: -1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.3318/eriu.2013.63.1
ISSN2009-0056
Autores Tópico(s)Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies
ResumoThis paper offers a detailed analysis of the syntactic use of Old Irish (= Oir) tonic personal pronouns and claims that they are employed primarily for expressing extraclausal NP functions (especially Focus, Topic and Reported Speaker constituents introduced mainly by the particle o I). In addition, Oir clitic pronouns express intraclausal functions (Subject, Object, Oblique), for which a tonic pronoun may be employed only in very specific syntactic circumstances. The syntactic analysis of Oir tonic pronouns constitutes the main part of this work, but some diachronic observations aimed at explaining specific features of the syntactic behaviour of Oir personal pronouns are also presented (among others, the systematic avoidance of tonic personal pronouns in the comparative construction with 0/, and the use of tonic pronouns for the Reported Speaker). 1. Antecedents and scope of the work The article in the Dictionary of the Irish Language (= DIL) devoted to the tonic 3rd person singular pronouns {DIL s.v. 1 e) gives quite an extensive list of the different uses of those forms, but it also notes that '[a] detailed examination of the use of the independent pronoun in Old and Middle Irish belongs to the syntax and would be out of place here'. In Thurneysen's Grammar , the use of the Old Irish (Oir) tonic pronouns is treated in almost a single page (Thurneysen 1946: 253-4), in comparison to the approximately twenty pages devoted to clitic pronouns. These two important works are representative of the relatively little attention paid to Oir tonic pronouns compared with their clitic counterparts. The latter type of pronoun constitutes the main subject of analysis, or plays a relevant role *This study has received financial support from the research projects FFI-2008-04009 and FFI201 1-27056 granted by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, and from the research group GIC 10/83, IT 486-10 (UFI 11/14) of the University of the Basque Country. I owe some relevant observations to Javier Martin Arista (University of La Rioja, Logrono); Aaron Griffith (University of Vienna) kindly provided me with two (at that time) unpublished papers of his. An anonymous reviewer for Eriu made valuable observations on a previous version of this paper. I'm much indebted to Professor Liam Breatnach for his comments. Inaccuracies and errors are entirely my own. Correspondence address: Facultad de Letras (UPV-EHU), C/ Francisco Tomas y Valiente, s/n, E-01006 Vitoria-Gasteiz (Spain). E-mail: carlos.garcia@ehu.es. DOI: 10.3318/ERIU.2013.63.1 Eriu LXIII (2013) 1-39 © Royal Irish Academy This content downloaded from 157.55.39.117 on Fri, 15 Jul 2016 06:14:29 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 2 CARLOS GARCIA CASTILLERO in a number of studies on Oir: Sommer (1896) established the corpus of the verbal forms containing an infixed pronoun directly attested in the Oir contemporaneous sources; Breatnach (1977) has analysed the suffixed pronouns; and Watkins (1963) evidenced the role of these clitic elements in the syntactic process leading to the Oir and Insular Celtic VI order. More recently, Schrijver (1997) has debated the etymology of the Oir pronouns, including of course the tonic forms; and Griffith (2008) analysed several morphosyntactic and etymological issues relating to the Oir clitic pronouns and the so-called notae augentes that are also clitics (see section 2.1 below). In contrast, specific studies on the Oir tonic pronouns are rare: the works of Roma (1999, 2000a, 2000b) may be noted here, although they concentrate more on developments in Middle and Modern Irish. Regarding the use of the Oir tonic pronouns, one may find summarising descriptions such as that by Greene (1958: 112), quoted by Roma (2000b: 107) at the beginning of her study: 'Since the pronouns in OI were never used with the verb, but only in absolute position or after nonpersonal is, they came to be used exactly like nouns, attached to the nonpersonal form'. Illuminating and insightful as such an observation may be, it is far from providing a detailed picture of Oir tonic pronouns. This study, therefore, aims at providing a unified account of the syntactic behaviour of the Oir tonic pronouns in the sense that they serve to express basically extraclausal NP functions, in contrast to the intraclausal NP functions expressed by their unstressed counterparts. The terms extraclausal and intraclausal are defined here according to the current syntactic notions of clause and sentence. Following Lyons's (1999: 149-52) basic definitions of those two terms, 'sentence' represents 'the maximal unit of grammatical analysis', whereas 'clauses' are 'composed of a subject and a predicate'. To be more precise, I consider here the roles of Subject, Object and Oblique (in the terminology of Andrews 2007: 152), or Adjunct (in the terminology of Van Valin and LaPolla 1997: 26-7, Van Valin 2005: 4), as intraclausal NP functions. Sentence and clause may indeed coincide in some cases, but a sentence represents a unit of higher rank than a clause, since it may contain more than one clause (when it includes a main and a subordinate clause), and since as a further possibility noted by Van Valin (2005: 4-6), among others it may also include other constituents that are not included in the intraclausal domain, such as dislocated Topic and Focus, that is to say, the markedly topical and Focus constituents. As a major assumption of this paper, I propose to consider two further extraclausal NP types for the analysis of the Oir sentence: the Vocative NP and the Reported Speaker. The first of these, which is introduced in Oir by the particle aL , has the basic function of stating who is being spoken to, and in this sense it is different from the detached (normally leftdetached) Topic NP, which serves to state what or who is being spoken about. The second, which is introduced in Oir by the particle ol (to quote the most frequently occurring form in the language of the Glosses) and is This content downloaded from 157.55.39.117 on Fri, 15 Jul 2016 06:14:29 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms OLD IRISH TONIC PRONOUNS AS EXTRACLAUSAL CONSTITUENTS 3 usually followed by a noun in nominative case or by a tonic pronoun (see section 8 below for further details), has the function of stating whose are the words that are being referred to.1 I propose a definition of NP extraclausality as a syntactic-pragmatic notion according to which the involved NP has no direct syntactic link with a verbal predicate and, at the same time, fulfils a function which may be defined in specific pragmatic
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