Intensifiers and reflexives in SAE, Insular Celtic and English

Abstract

Intensifiers and reflexives have been studied as features both in areal linguistics and in the context of substratum hypotheses. While typical SAE languages differentiate between intensifiers and reflexives, English, Welsh and Irish use complex intensifiers for both functions. This article discusses the two strategies with regard to their diachronic developments, starting with PIE. Complex intensifiers are first recorded in Old British and emerge only later in English and Irish. These complex intensifiers are then increasingly used as reflexives, constituting an instance of areal divergence from SAE between the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. Breton, on the other hand, maintains its intensifier - reflexive differentiation due to areal convergence.

Evidence for Britain and Ireland as a linguistic area

“…In her qualitative account, Irslinger (2014) suggests that the development of what could be called the 'insular type' of reflexivization is an areal phenomenon that happens more or less contemporaneously in Irish, Welsh, and English (most probably in the early modern period), and this hypothesis finds quantitative support from the areally constrained increase in similarity in our data during the second period between 1200 ce and 1900 ce. We conclude that the observed areal convergence is to a significant degree driven by historical contingencies, that is, demographic and sociocultural developments that happened in Britain and Ireland during or slightly before the period under investigation.…”

“…In this article, we zoom in on Britain and Ireland, a configuration with a long history in areal linguistics. Linguistic areas containing or intersecting with Britain and Ireland have, for example, been proposed in Morris -Jones 1900, Pokorny 1927, Wagner 1959, 1964, Haspelmath 2001, Wehr 2005, and Hickey 2012, 2017a, to mention but a few, and accounts of possible Celtic influence on English include Preusler 1938, Tolkien 1963, Tristram 1999, Vezzosi 2005, Lange 2007, Lutz 2009, Poppe 2009, Schumacher 2009, and Irslinger 2013, 2014. This configuration is ideal for this kind of investigation because the sociocultural context is well understood, the geospatial setting is easily definable, and the languages spoken in this configuration are rather well documented over a long span of time.…”

“…While the method is supposed to work on an arbitrarily chosen set of features, our choice-that is, reflexive constructions-is not entirely random for two reasons. First, there is much recent qualitative research on reflexives from an areal northwest European perspective (Tristram 1999, Haspelmath 2001, Lange 2005, Vezzosi 2005, Poppe 2009, Vennemann 2013, Irslinger 2014. Second, two conflicting hypotheses have been proposed based on this qualitative research: some scholars hypothesize that the contemporaneous emergence of at least some reflexivization strategies is indicative of areal convergence in Britain and Ireland (Tristram 1999, Haspelmath 2001, Vezzosi 2005, Vennemann 2013, and in particular Irslinger 2014, while others take a much more cautious stance (Lange 2005, Poppe 2009.…”

Transitivity and Subject Positions in Old Irish

“…masculine pronoun) to a verbal root to produce various kinds of reciprocal constructions (Dedio & Widmer ). Pronominal conversion is just one of several kinds of argument structure‐changing strategies in Old Irish, such as NP‐promotion passivization, reflexive verbs (Thurneysen : 251; Irslinger : 180f. ; 2017: 109, ex.10), and the anti‐passive use of imma N (Dedio & Widmer : 197).…”

Mihi est from Brythonic to Breton II

“…If proclitication to em-is an MB innovation, LVB: 252-5, Lambert 2010: 177, cf. Irslinger 2014, Dedio and Widmer 2017, it reveals early the general change of object case of infinitives to accusative of late 17C-, HMSB: §54. The genitive may then have been early reanalysed as allomorph of accusative with nonfinite forms.…”