Adjectival Agreement in Middle and Early Modern Welsh Native and Translated Prose

Abstract

This paper investigates adjectival agreement in a group of Middle Welsh native prose texts and a sample of translations from around the end of the Middle Welsh period and the beginning of the Early Modern period. It presents a new methodology, employing tagged historical corpora allowing for consistent linguistic comparison. The adjectival agreement case study tests a hypothesis regarding position and function of adjectives in Middle Welsh, as well as specific semantic groups of adjectives, such as colours or related modifiers. The systematic analysis using an annotated corpus reveals that there are interesting differences between native and translated texts, as well as between individual texts. However, zooming in on our adjectival agreement case study, we conclude that these differences do not correspond to many of our hypotheses or assumptions about how certain texts group together. In particular, no clear split into native and translated texts emerged between the texts in our corpus. This paper thus shows interesting results for both (historical) linguists, especially those working on agreement, and scholars of medieval Celtic philology and translation texts.

Morphosyntactic Variation in Medieval Celtic Languages

“…At the current stage, the annotation of the corpus was done in such a way as to optimise the search queries specific to the change of word order in the early Middle Welsh period (see Meelen 2016). However, the same annotated partial corpus of Middle Welsh was also already used for studies on adjectival agreement in native and translated Welsh prose (see Meelen and Nurmio 2020;Parina and Poppe forthc. ).…”

When is a Knight a Knight?

“…Post Several recent quantitative analyses (Meelen & Nurmio 2020;Nurmio 2019;Parina & Poppe, in preparation), however, have shown that such a simple separation of native prose and translations is not possible. Even though there is considerable variance between the studied texts, there is no clear distinction between native prose and translations (Nurmio 2019: 180, 188-189;Meelen & Nurmio 2020: 22).…”

“…Among other things, adjectival number agreement with a governing plural noun was identified as a marker for-or fault of, as it was seen-a supposed translation style (Luft 2016: 170-172). Recent studies (Meelen & Nurmio 2020;Nurmio 2019;Parina & Poppe, in preparation) have put those assumptions to the test. In this paper another translation, Ystoryaeu Seint Greal, the 'Stories of the Holy Grail', is examined with a special focus on adjectival agreement in plural noun phrases.…”