Remarks on the left periphery in the medieval Brittonic languages
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http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11956/123611Identifiers
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- Číslo 1 [2]
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Issue Date
2020Publisher
Univerzita Karlova, Filozofická fakultaPraha
Praha
Source document
Chatreššar (web)ISSN: 2571-1393
Periodical publication year: 2020
Periodical Volume: 2020
Periodical Issue: 1
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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/Keywords (English)
left periphery, syntactic cartography, verb-second phenomenon, relaxed verb-second, Middle Welsh, Middle Breton, Middle CornishThis paper proposes that the clausal configuration of affirmative root clauses in the medieval Brittonic languages is best characterised as a token of a relaxed verb-second (V2) language, in which the verb can appear as late as sixth position in the clause, but can be preceded by no more than a single argument. The absolute restriction to only a single argument occurring before the verb is related to the evolution of medieval Brittonic V2 from a cleft structure. There are, in fact, tokens of two arguments appearing before the verb in all of the medieval Brittonic languages, but these are exclusively the result of poetic overdetermination.