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.

Morphosyntactic dialect variation, once a neglected area of dialect research, has recently witnessed a large growth in interest. Various methods from geospatial data analysis have been applied to morphosyntactic data. To date, the focus has largely been on analyzing the distribution of stable patterns of variation. This article extends this work to examine patterns of ongoing change. It uses a body of data from the Syntactic Atlas of Welsh Dialects and the Siarad Corpus of spoken Welsh to examine the innovation and diffusion of a new second-person singular pronoun,chdi, testing the usefulness of Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) as a method for identifying and modeling patterns of ongoing syntactic change. It is shown that GWR provides plausible models of the diachronic development of changes that are still in progress. Furthermore, it allows us to test whether rates of change are constant across geographical space, allowing us to test whether the Constant Rate Hypothesis (that diffusion of change proceeds at the same rate in different environments) holds between dialects.

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In both standard and nonstandard varieties of English there are several contexts in which the word never functions as a sentential negator rather than as a negative temporal adverb. This article investigates the pragmatic and distributional differences between the various non-temporal uses of never and examines their synchronic and historical relationship to the ordinary temporal quantifier use, drawing on corpora of Early Modern and present-day British English. Primary focus is on (i) a straightforward negator use that in prescriptively approved varieties of English has an aspectual restriction to non-chance, completive achievement predicates in the preterite, but no such restriction in nonstandard English; and (ii) a distinct categorical-denial use that quantifies over possible perspectives on a situation. Against Cheshire (1998), it is argued that neither of these uses represents continuity with non-temporal uses of never in Middle English, but both are instead relatively recent innovations resulting from semantic reanalysis and the semanticization of implicatures.

Lightfoot (2002) argues that syntactic reconstruction is rendered impossible by the lack of any analogue in syntax to the traditional notion of the phonological 'correspondence set ' of the Comparative Method and by the radical discontinuity caused by reanalysis between successive grammars. Alice Harris and Lyle Campbell, in various works, have defended the notion of ' syntactic pattern ' as the analogue of the correspondence set, arguing that patterns can be compared across languages, with innovations being stripped away to reveal aspects of the protolanguage. In this article, I argue that syntactic reconstruction can be carried out while maintaining and indeed utilizing core notions in generative approaches to syntactic change such as the central role of reanalysis and child language acquisition and the distinction between the abstract grammatical system and the surface output of that system. Reanalysis itself is constrained by the fact that both pre-and post-reanalysis grammars must be acquirable on the basis of the same primary linguistic data. This imposes limits on the possible hypotheses that can be entertained ('local directionality ') even in the absence of any crosslinguistic generalizations about patterns of change ('universal directionality'). This approach is then applied to aspects of the syntax of free relative clauses and negation in the early Brythonic Celtic languages (Welsh, Breton and Cornish), showing that non-trivial reconstructions can be achieved even where the daughter languages manifest significant differences.