Old Irish – Morphosyntactic Structures, Part 4
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Griffith, Aaron
This lecture continues the topic of verbal categories in Old Irish, dealing with tense, aspect, mood, and negation. In addition, this lecture addresses clause structure and word order.
 Welcome to this, the final section on morphosyntactic structures in Old Irish. It's a full one, so let's get started right away. So in this video we're going to look at more on the verb, specifically negation, tense aspect and modality, as well as verbal avoiding strategies. Then we'll move on to the clause structure to look at word order, information structure, and clause combining. Finally you have a chance to look at and yet one last section on time bofraug. Since verbs are hugely important, we're still stuck on them for much of this video. The first section is negation. As with so many other features of Old Irish, the primary split in negation comes via finite versus non-finite predication. For non-finite predication we use the preposition ken without. So if we take a look here, agaldove is a verbal noun meaning addressing. To negate that you say ken agaldove, not addressing. For an example with a complete sentence we can look at the following. ad rividsov deid su arvelacht ken arndidjan ni. They counter as a reproach to you literally without our protecting, but this is non-finite predication and that means without, not to protect us. So it's a reproach to God that he has not protected us, us being the Israelis, in this case the Israelites. Now for finite negation things look a little bit different. There are various conjunct particles that do this. So for main clause negation there's ni or nikon and with imperatives na. So bjerd means he carries. To negate it you say ni bjer and the imperative is na bjer. You can see why you need two different negations here because if the negation was the same for imperatives and declaratives there would be no difference between he does not carry and don't carry. If we now move on to subordinate negation you can see there you can use naad or naadkon and nach with in-fixed pronouns. So bjerd means who carries. Naad bjer who does not carry and na'him bjer who does not carry me. This is then negation. Now let's turn to tense aspect and modality. These are important features of old Irish but I'm not going to spend a lot of time illustrating them. I will simply be letting you know what there is. So starting with tense. There's a three-way system of tense past, present and future. Present time is marked by the present tense. Past is marked by the imperfect, the preterite, the perfect also known as the augmented preterite and the historical present. Finally the future is marked by the future. Aspect is coded variously. The imperfective aspect is marked by the imperfect. Perfective is marked by the preterite and the perfect or augmented preterite. Progressive aspect is marked via the verb atah plus og plus verbal noun and this means is doing x whatever the verbal noun means. The habitual exists as well but only with atah via a sublative stem. Finally the retrospective is marked by the perfect or augmented preterite so has done something. The retrospective is disappearing within the old Irish period. It was active, it was part of the language in the early part but by the end of the old Irish period had fallen together with the preterite. Okay now we can look at modality. The moods of old Irish are indicative, subjunctive and imperative. The subjunctive is more common in subordinate clauses. The imperative however is barred from subordinate clauses. This is made up for by the fact that the subjunctive can express deontic modality so it can express commands. It can also express epistemic modality so we're sure uncertainty. Okay perhaps this has all become too much for you and you're looking for some way to avoid all these verb complications. Fortunately there are a few ways to do that. Here are three verb avoidance strategies. One is to use a light verb construction that is you use the verb doge ni which means basically does or makes so instead of using a finite verb you can just say does plus a verbal noun and in this example it means it is not a seeking with complaint which he does. So here's a verbal noun it's not a seeking with complaint that he does instead of using the finite form of seeking which if you really wanted to you could do as indicated at the bottom. The second verb avoidance strategy is simply to leave the verb out. This is especially common with things that look like basically small clauses. Here you have carbid davsa. This means literally chariot to me as in bring a chariot to me or infer uit davsa the man from you to me or death upon your lips. This is fairly common in all Irish simply you can leave out the verb and if you have a small clause that can serve as a sentence. Okay and a third way to avoid using a verb is simply to use a verbal noun. I'm going to focus here on the second half of this rather long example. Oisch eilte do tofun. Here we have a verbal noun this the sentence means wild deer to hunt as in wild deer were hunted. There's no actual finite verb there's simply a do infinitive do plus the verbal noun. This way you can avoid the complications of having a finite verb. Okay that brings us to the end of the long section on verbs. Now it's time to look at clauses. We'll start with word order. The basic order for the finite verb is verb subject object as we can see in this example. So the verb ro gav is followed by the subject doeth david and in salam sa the song. It is about that that david sang that this song so verb subject object. If we look at non-finite predication the order is verb object subject and here we see an example. I dossoch in the beginning gavala taking toi eilte leadership. So in the beginning of the taking of the leadership by Moses. So we have verb the non-finite verb followed by the object toi eilte and do moise at the end is the subject. This is the standard word order for non-finite predication. Nonetheless there is some flexibility in word order apart from the verb replacement. So this allows for movement of constituents for clarity, emphasis, and other things. So we can see in this example here that Ken Tavert so without giving of help of your help to us by you. Here the order is actually verb subject object and it looks like they've moved the from the normal place. Normally we would expect dite shu as subject to be after the object but it looked like they moved it to avoid having two doh prepositions next to each other and there is since there is some flexibility they are able to do that. Okay now it's time to switch to talking about information structure. Old Irish has a couple ways of structuring sentences to give you as the reader or the hearer an idea of how the information in that sentence is structured. One of those is cleft sentences. Cleft sentences allow the fronted word or phrase to be emphasized. Less often topicalized. Here we see an example of that. So Irish doh thavrt dih leh berd in Gleidivshin. It is in order to inflict vengeance that he carries that sword. This is emphasizing the fact that it's in order to inflict vengeance. That's what it that's doing. This phrase has been fronted and it is then emphasized. The same thing happens in the second sentence. There was a portion of them who had not believed. That's emphasizing the portion of them. Thus cleft sentences allow you to front something and emphasize it. Another strategy is left dislocation. Also sometimes called a nominative was pendants. In this case a noun or pronoun is fronted and this establishes as that the topic of the sentence. It must be resumed however by some other element in the sentence as this example shows. Inna hi is the fronted element. It literally just means the things or those. It is modified by a relative clause. Those things which were at the beginning and then it is picked up in the main clause. He puts them. This little infixed pronoun picks up the topic. So the things that should have been first he put them last. So left dislocation is another strategy for structuring the information in your sentence. You can indicate the topic that way. Okay now I'd like to look at how you combine clauses because you've now seen how elements in a clause can appear. What about when you want to combine them? Well you have some options. You have a conjunctive coordinator. August meaning and. There is a disjunctive one. No or rodovo. No either or. There's an adversive conjunction. Acht, but or accept. And all of these forms can combine clauses. They can also have or combine nouns, adjectives or verbs. A major strategy for combining clauses is relative clauses. There are two things here that are important. There's morphologically relative forms. So here we can see Bioreth he carries, but with a special ending Bioreth you get who carries or whom he carries. This is a morphologically relative form. In addition however there are morphosyntactic indications of relatives. This is then Linnician or nasalization after the first pre-verb or conjunct particle. So adki means he sees. Adhi with Linnician means who sees or whom he sees. And adgi with nasalization means whom he sees. These are then the basic mechanisms for indicating relative. Now they can be used for almost any syntactic role, but not everyone. So they can be used for the subject, object and date of a prepositional relatives. So the subject relative has a morphologically relative form or it can be indicated by a Linnitian relative clause. An object relative can take the same cases, so as the subject relative, plus nasalizing relative. A prepositional relative can take the same things as an object or subject, plus a special prepositional relative. I will show you an example of that in a minute. The genitive stands somewhat apart from these other ones in that it appears it's only possible with copular sentences in which the subject or predicate is possessed. It's a very complicated sort of construction and I don't want to give more details than that. It is possible, but it looks as if they needed different means of expressing this. And this is also typologically fairly common that a possessive relative is difficult or impossible to form in many languages. So let's look at an example of a prepositional relative. This sentence is interesting because it has two different strategies. It has, well I will read it first, nech sødigter lok dyngindol inna agatheir ni. Literally it's anyone that a strong place is established to him. So you have a regular relative clause here, anyone who is established a strong place to him. This is one possible way of looking at a relative clause with a preposition. The more usual way is, however, is the second instance in the same sentence. Here, if we look, you have i, which is the preposition, followed by a relative negation, na, in which not fear anything. So these are two different strategies for creating a relative clause with a preposition. So with that, we can now move on to one more point that's important for relatives. These are what I like to call true relatives versus fake relatives. True relatives are relatives that have an antecedent in a previous clause, and interestingly they can only be third person. And the example here shows this. This is a cleft sentence. Es mé is tu is kach, a the he kon goleng. It's me, it's you, it's everyone who sees kukalen. And if you remember, accented pronouns like mé or tu can only appear in a couple places. One of them is as a predicate. But when they appear as a predicate with a relative clause, the relative clause is in the third person singular. So that means that true relatives must be third persons. If we switch to fake relatives, I call these fake relatives because they're relative only because of special rules of old Irish. They generally indicate subordination, and they can be of any person. The short examples here can show that. So as biur means I say. But if you want to say when I say, you have to say anas nbiur. And the particle a, which means when, simply requires a relative form of the verb. And in the third person as biur, but anas nbiur. So fake relatives are relative in Irish only because it's required by the grammar, not because there's an antecedent. Okay, having mentioned subordination, let's look at some more subordinating conjunctions. They've a varied syntax. Sometimes they're conjunct particles. Sometimes they're not. Sometimes they require a nasalizing relative. Sometimes they don't. They're temporal, causal, purpose, condition, explicative, or concessive conjunctions. I don't want to go through the list of all of them, but there they are. You have a plethora to choose from if you're interested. Okay, at this point we've reached the end of the section on morphosyntex about Irish. There's still one more text sample video to watch. In the meantime, however, I'll talk her in the future. Thank you for your attention.
 Welcome to this, the final section on morphosyntactic structures in Old Irish.  It's a full one, so let's get started right away. So in this video we're going  to look at more on the verb, specifically negation, tense aspect and  modality, as well as verbal avoiding strategies. Then we'll move on to the  clause structure to look at word order, information structure, and clause  combining. Finally you have a chance to look at and yet one last section on  time bofraug. Since verbs are hugely important, we're still stuck on them  for much of this video. The first section is negation. As with so many other  features of Old Irish, the primary split in negation comes via finite versus  non-finite predication. For non-finite predication we use the preposition  ken without. So if we take a look here,  agaldove is a verbal noun meaning addressing. To negate that you say ken agaldove,  not addressing. For an example with a complete sentence we can look at the  following.  ad rividsov deid su arvelacht ken arndidjan ni. They counter as a  reproach to you literally without our protecting, but this is non-finite  predication and that means without, not to protect us. So it's a reproach to God  that he has not protected us, us being the Israelis, in this case the  Israelites. Now for finite negation things look a little bit different. There  are various conjunct particles that do this. So for main clause negation there's  ni or nikon and with imperatives na. So bjerd means he carries. To negate it you  say ni bjer and the imperative is na bjer. You can see why you need two  different negations here because if the negation was the same for imperatives  and declaratives there would be no difference between he does not carry and  don't carry. If we now move on to subordinate negation you can see there  you can use naad or naadkon and nach with in-fixed pronouns. So bjerd means  who carries. Naad bjer who does not carry and na'him bjer who does not carry me.  This is then negation. Now let's turn to tense aspect and modality. These are  important features of old Irish but I'm not going to spend a lot of time  illustrating them. I will simply be letting you know what there is. So starting  with tense. There's a three-way system of tense past, present and future.  Present time is marked by the present tense. Past is marked by the imperfect,  the preterite, the perfect also known as the augmented preterite and the  historical present. Finally the future is marked by the future.  Aspect is coded variously. The imperfective aspect is marked by the  imperfect. Perfective is marked by the preterite and the perfect or augmented  preterite. Progressive aspect is marked via the verb atah plus og plus verbal  noun and this means is doing x whatever the verbal noun means. The habitual  exists as well but only with atah via a sublative stem. Finally the retrospective  is marked by the perfect or augmented preterite so has done something. The  retrospective is disappearing within the old Irish period. It was active, it was  part of the language in the early part but by the end of the old Irish period  had fallen together with the preterite. Okay now we can look at modality. The  moods of old Irish are indicative, subjunctive and imperative. The subjunctive  is more common in subordinate clauses. The imperative however is barred from  subordinate clauses. This is made up for by the fact that the subjunctive can  express deontic modality so it can express commands. It can also express  epistemic modality so we're sure uncertainty. Okay perhaps this has all  become too much for you and you're looking for some way to avoid all these  verb complications. Fortunately there are a few ways to do that. Here are three  verb avoidance strategies. One is to use a light verb construction that is you use  the verb doge ni which means basically does or makes so instead of using a  finite verb you can just say does plus a verbal noun and in this example it means  it is not a seeking with complaint which he does. So here's a verbal noun it's not  a seeking with complaint that he does instead of using the finite form of  seeking which if you really wanted to you could do as indicated at the bottom.  The second verb avoidance strategy is simply to leave the verb out. This is  especially common with things that look like basically small clauses. Here you  have carbid davsa. This means literally chariot to me as in bring a chariot to me  or infer uit davsa the man from you to me or death upon your lips. This is fairly  common in all Irish simply you can leave out the verb and if you have a small  clause that can serve as a sentence. Okay and a third way to avoid using a  verb is simply to use a verbal noun. I'm going to focus here on the second half  of this rather long example. Oisch eilte do tofun. Here we have a verbal noun this  the sentence means wild deer to hunt as in wild deer were hunted. There's no  actual finite verb there's simply a do infinitive do plus the verbal noun. This  way you can avoid the complications of having a finite verb. Okay that brings  us to the end of the long section on verbs. Now it's time to look at clauses.  We'll start with word order. The basic order for the finite verb is verb  subject object as we can see in this example. So the verb ro gav is followed  by the subject doeth david and in salam sa the song. It is about that that  david sang that this song so verb subject object. If we look at non-finite  predication the order is verb object subject and here we see an example.  I dossoch in the beginning gavala taking toi eilte leadership. So in the  beginning of the taking of the leadership by Moses. So we have verb the  non-finite verb followed by the object toi eilte and do moise at the end is the  subject. This is the standard word order for non-finite predication.  Nonetheless there is some flexibility in word order apart from the verb  replacement. So this allows for movement of constituents for clarity, emphasis,  and other things. So we can see in this example here that Ken Tavert so  without giving of help of your help to us by you. Here the order is actually  verb subject object and it looks like they've moved the from the normal place.  Normally we would expect dite shu as subject to be after the object but it  looked like they moved it to avoid having two doh prepositions next to each  other and there is since there is some flexibility they are able to do that.  Okay now it's time to switch to talking about information structure. Old Irish  has a couple ways of structuring sentences to give you as the reader or  the hearer an idea of how the information in that sentence is structured.  One of those is cleft sentences. Cleft sentences allow the fronted word or  phrase to be emphasized. Less often topicalized. Here we see an example of  that. So Irish doh thavrt dih leh berd in Gleidivshin. It is in order to inflict  vengeance that he carries that sword. This is emphasizing the fact that it's in  order to inflict vengeance. That's what it that's doing. This phrase has been  fronted and it is then emphasized. The same thing happens in the second sentence.  There was a portion of them who had not believed. That's emphasizing the portion  of them. Thus cleft sentences allow you to front something and emphasize it.  Another strategy is left dislocation. Also sometimes called a nominative was  pendants. In this case a noun or pronoun is fronted and this establishes as  that the topic of the sentence. It must be resumed however by some other element  in the sentence as this example shows. Inna hi is the fronted element. It literally  just means the things or those. It is modified by a relative clause. Those  things which were at the beginning and then it is picked up in the main clause.  He puts them. This little infixed pronoun picks up the topic. So the things  that should have been first he put them last. So left dislocation is another  strategy for structuring the information in your sentence. You can indicate the  topic that way. Okay now I'd like to look at how you combine clauses because  you've now seen how elements in a clause can appear. What about when you want to  combine them? Well you have some options. You have a conjunctive coordinator.  August meaning and. There is a disjunctive one. No or rodovo. No either or. There's an  adversive conjunction. Acht, but or accept. And all of these forms can combine  clauses. They can also have or combine nouns, adjectives or verbs. A major  strategy for combining clauses is relative clauses. There are two things  here that are important. There's morphologically relative forms. So here  we can see Bioreth he carries, but with a special ending Bioreth you get who  carries or whom he carries. This is a morphologically relative form. In addition  however there are morphosyntactic indications of relatives. This is then  Linnician or nasalization after the first pre-verb or conjunct particle. So adki  means he sees. Adhi with Linnician means who sees or whom he sees. And adgi with  nasalization means whom he sees. These are then the basic mechanisms for  indicating relative. Now they can be used for almost any syntactic role, but not  everyone. So they can be used for the subject, object and date of a prepositional  relatives. So the subject relative has a morphologically relative form or it can  be indicated by a Linnitian relative clause. An object relative can take the  same cases, so as the subject relative, plus  nasalizing relative. A prepositional relative can take the same things as an  object or subject, plus a special prepositional relative. I will show you an  example of that in a minute. The genitive stands somewhat apart from these  other ones in that it appears it's only possible with copular sentences in which  the subject or predicate is possessed. It's a very complicated sort of  construction and I don't want to give more details than that. It is possible,  but it looks as if they needed different means of expressing this. And this is  also typologically fairly common that a possessive relative is difficult or  impossible to form in many languages. So let's look at an example of a  prepositional relative. This sentence is interesting because it has two different  strategies. It has, well I will read it first,  nech sødigter lok dyngindol inna agatheir ni. Literally it's anyone that a  strong place is established to him. So you have a regular relative clause here,  anyone who is established a strong place to him. This is one possible way of  looking at a relative clause with a preposition. The more usual way is, however,  is the second instance in the same sentence. Here, if we look, you have i,  which is the preposition, followed by a relative negation, na, in which not fear  anything. So these are two different strategies for creating a relative clause  with a preposition. So with that, we can now move on to one more point that's  important for relatives. These are what I like to call true relatives versus fake  relatives. True relatives are relatives that have an antecedent in a previous  clause, and interestingly they can only be third person. And the example here  shows this. This is a cleft sentence. Es mé is tu is kach, a the he kon goleng.  It's me, it's you, it's everyone who sees kukalen. And if you remember, accented  pronouns like mé or tu can only appear in a couple places. One of them is as a  predicate. But when they appear as a predicate with a relative clause, the  relative clause is in the third person singular. So that means that true  relatives must be third persons. If we switch to fake relatives, I call these  fake relatives because they're relative only because of special rules of old  Irish. They generally indicate subordination, and they can be of any  person. The short examples here can show that. So as biur means I say. But if you  want to say when I say, you have to say anas nbiur. And the particle a, which  means when, simply requires a relative form of the verb. And in the third  person as biur, but anas nbiur. So fake relatives are relative in Irish only  because it's required by the grammar, not because there's an antecedent. Okay,  having mentioned subordination, let's look at some more subordinating  conjunctions. They've a varied syntax. Sometimes they're conjunct particles.  Sometimes they're not. Sometimes they require a nasalizing relative. Sometimes  they don't. They're temporal, causal, purpose, condition, explicative, or  concessive conjunctions. I don't want to go through the list of all of them, but  there they are. You have a plethora to choose from if you're interested.  Okay, at this point we've reached the end of the section on morphosyntex about  Irish. There's still one more text sample video to watch. In the meantime, however,  I'll talk her in the future. Thank you for your attention.
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