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Is the Welsh verbal noun a verb or a noun? Penny Willis To cite this article: Penny Willis (1988) Is the Welsh verbal noun a verb or a noun?, WORD, 39:3, 201-224, DOI: 10.1080/00437956.1988.11435790 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00437956.1988.11435790

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Date: 25 January 2017, At: 09:29

Penny W i l l i s - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Is the Welsh verbal noun a verb or a noun?* 1. Introduction. In most grammars and dictionaries of Welsh, the verb is cited in a form traditionally called the verbal noun or verb-noun (W. berfenw). 1 However, while the traditional treatment of Welsh grammar (e.g. Morris-Jones, 1921) does identify these forms as nouns, most handbooks and Welsh-English dictionaries also describe them as uninflected verb forms and translate them as infinitives: (1) a. canu 'to sing'

b. dymuno 'to wish' c. cofio 'to remember' d. peidio 'to cease' e. enwi 'to name' f. gweld (~ gwel-ed) to see g. mynd et y

l'f mwnclod

S,

~ PT

0

AUX

T~s

NP

6_

VP A§P---:-.

y mwnclod

~

V I

dianc

pp

~ o'r

Sw

bod wedi

WILLIS: WELSH VERBAL NOUN

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6

I have attached the particle to the verb, rather than setting up a separate node for it, because of the initial mutations that most particles trigger: the domain of mutation is normally across morpheme boundaries inside the phonological word. (it is a characteristic of the Celtic languages that sequences such as Det + N, Prep + N, etc., should be treated as prefix + stem in a single word. Note my phonetic transcriptions in (19).) 7 The argument regarding selectional restrictions seems to me irrelevant. Consider the following sentences from English, with a nod to Chomsky (1970:60): a. b. c. d.

John refused the offer John's refusal of the offer *The rock refused the offer *The rock's refusal of the offer

'Refusal' is obviously a noun; even if it is derived from the verb 'refuse', that does not require it to be analyzed as a verb in sentences. In Welsh it is no doubt the case that verbal nouns and finite verbs normally have the same stem in the lexicon; however, that should not mean that they must be considered the same part of speech. 8

Fy [v;J] 'my' is strictly literary; the colloquial form is yn [;Jn]. I am using the literary form in this paper as a.convenience to the reader, in order to avoid confusion with the homophonous prepositions yn 'in' (which also causes the nasal mutation) and yn 'at'. The facts are basically the same: ex. (19a) is [;Jnhi:] in speech. Cf. also the forms used in (28): the spoken forms would be [;Jn;JI)aroj 'in my garden' and [;Jn;JI)wcldj 'at my seeing', rather than [;Jnv;JI)ari'\] and [;JnV;JI)WC!d]. 9 The possessive pronoun may be repeated after the verb as the corresponding independent pronoun. This is usually done in speech (though there are some cases in which it is prohibited; see section 5.5). I interpret this sequence as a possessive NP NP construction. (However, see note 10 below for a possible counterargument to this.) 10 These object pronouns occur only in literary Welsh; in speech, even where inflected verbs are still used, disjunctive pronouns following the verb serve as objects: fe weles i fe 'prt saw I him = I saw him'. Again, however, the contrast between true preceding object pronouns and the misnamed 'preceding objects' of the verbal nouns is useful. Note that here, too, the pronoun can be copied postverbally, and in this case it cannot be interpreted as a possessive. 11 Sentences (31d,e) illustrate the so-called 'cael' passive, which is passive only in a semantic sense. There is also--in literary and 'news-report' Welsh-an inflected so-called 'impersonal passive', which is also not a grammatical passive: Codir y tf' 'one builds the house = the house is (being) built'. 12 The verb darfu apparently cannot be used with an ordinary noun as the subject. The normal meaning of darfod is 'dying' or 'ending'; its use as a past tense formative is idiomatic. 13 However, James Fife (personal communication) cites mae e' n cyflym ruthro 'he is at a quick hurrying = he is quickly hurrying'; cf. also section 5.4. 14 In (40c), the second yn is a particle which occurs before predicate nouns or adjectives/ adverbs; it causes lenition and is a completely different form from the preposition. In Welsh, the same form can be used as an adjective or adverb: Mae John yn dda 'is J. prt good = J. is good'; fe ddarllenodd Gwen yn dda 'prt read G. prt good = G. read well'. 15 A certain number of prepositions in Welsh can have personal pronoun endings: ar 'on', arno fe 'on him', ami hi 'on her', arnoch chi 'on you'. Note the repetition of the corresponding independent pronoun after the 'inflected' preposition.

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16 The homophony of the two ungrammatical sentences is due to the fact that eisiau begins with a non-lenitable segment; the predicate particle causes lenition of a mutable consonant. Note the interesting fact that predicate particles cannot precede verbal nouns; if yn precedes it is prepositional. (This raises the question of whether predicative yn might be considered a preposition in Welsh, even though it would be untranslatable into English.) 17 There are other instances of prepositions separated from verbal nouns:

a. Roedd hi' n gweithio yn y ry ar of iddi hi briodi Was she at working in the house after to her marrying she was working in the house after she got married b. Roedd hi'n gweithio mewn swyddfa cyn iddi hi briodi Was she at working in an office before to her marrying = she was working in an office before she got married. The verbal noun priodi 'marrying' is lenited-even though ar of and cyn both preserve the radical. It may be that lenition here is due to the preposition i 'to'; however, I suspect that the situation is analogous to the one illustrated in (38a), with lenition of a subject separated from the verb. (This would also explain lenition in yn cyflym ruthro.) REFERENCES Awbery, G. M. 1976. The syntax of Welsh: a transformational study of the passive. London: Cambridge U. Press. Chomsky, Noam. 1970. "Remarks on nominalization." In N. Chomsky, Studies on semantics in generative grammar. The Hague: Mouton (1972), Pp. 11-61. Fife, James. 1986. "Additional facts about Welsh VP's." Journal of linguistics 22:179-86. Harlow, Stephen. 1986. "The syntax of Welsh soft mutation." Paper delivered at the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference, Lexington, Ky., April 24-26, 1986. Jones, Morris and Alan R. Thomas. I977. The Welsh language: studies in its syntax and semantics. Cardiff: U. of Wales Press. Morris-Jones, Sir John. 1921. An elementary Welsh grammar. London: Oxford U. Press. Rhys Jones, T. J. 1977. Living Welsh. Teach Yourself Books. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Zwicky, Arnold. 1984. Welsh soft mutation and the case of object NPs. (ms.)