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Current research-project:

Western Europe as a Linguistic Area – Historical and Comparative Aspects
Duration: September 2010 - August 2013
Funding: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)

This project aims to study convergence phenomena of Celtic, Romance, Germanic languages and of the Basque language, whose presence in Western Europe has been documented since ancient times. Continuous cultural exchange and language contact, thanks to favourable commercial, technical and political conditions, have since led to linguistic levelling of the involved languages and to the creation of a specific Western European language type. Nowadays, there are several theoretical approaches describing the typological characteristics common to Western European languages and their classification into different linguistic areas. Apart from the Balkan Sprachbund, the widely researched Standard Average European Sprachbund in particular deserves mention, which is considered to be constituted by the main central European standard written languages.
By contrast, the postulate of a Western European linguistic area wants to give greater attention to the roles of the peripheral languages such as Insular Celtic languages and the Basque language. This postulate starts from the fact that Insular Celtic languages and Basque were extended over a larger geographical area in the past. For this reason, their influence on the creation of a European language type should not be neglected. To this end, this research project focuses on the reorganization of grammatical systems from the point of view of convergence, with special emphasis on historical developments.

Ziel des Projekts ist die Erforschung translinguistischer Konvergenzen der keltischen, romanischen und germanischen Sprachen sowie des Baskischen, deren Anwesenheit in Westeuropa seit der Antike dokumentiert ist.  Austausch und Sprachkontakt die ganze Zeit hindurch, der durch kommerzielle, technische und politische Gegebenheiten begünstigt wurde, führte zur Angleichung der beteiligten Sprachen und zur Ausbildung eines spezifisch westeuropäischen Sprachtyps. Derzeit existieren verschiedene Ansätze zur Beschreibung typologischer Gemeinsamkeiten europäischer Sprachen und ihrer Zusammenfassung in verschiedenen Sprachbünden. Neben dem Balkansprachbund ist vor allem der vielbeachtete SAE-Sprachbund zu nennen, als dessen Vertreter die großen mitteleuropäischen Schriftsprachen angesehen werden. Das Postulat eines "westeuropäischen" Sprachbunds will im Gegensatz dazu die Rolle der sog. Randsprachen Inselkeltisch und Baskisch stärker berücksichtigen aufgrund der Tatsache, dass diese in der Vergangenheit weiter verbreitet waren und ihr Einfluss auf die Ausbildung des europäischen Sprachtyps daher nicht vernachlässigt werden darf. Hierzu wird die Umstrukturierung grammatischer Teilsysteme - aus dem Blickwinkel der Konvergenz und unter Einbeziehung der diachronen Entwicklung - untersucht.


The Development of Gender in the Brittonic Languages

Duration: February 2007 - January 2010

Funding: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)

Continental Celtic, though of fragmentary attestation, continues the three-gender-system of Proto-Indo-European, and within the branch of Insular Celtic, Old Irish also preserves the neuter, but abandons it on its way to Modern Irish.

In sharp contrast to this, the Brittonic languages Welsh, Breton and Cornish are lacking cases and the neuter gender right from the beginning of their attestation. With regard to nouns, the treatment both as masculine and feminine is regarded as an indirect indication of an original neuter. The majority of the neuter nouns was assigned either the masculine or the feminine gender.

Recently Corbett (1991 and 2000) has shown that in many languages there is a close relationship between gender and number. As the Brittonic languages possess an elaborate and, within the IE language family, a unique system for the coding of number, comprising e.g. collectives, a formally marked singulative and a "dual" number, it seems to be promising to examine, whether the loss of the neuter was partly compensated by these categories. The Brittonic languages did not develop uniformly in this field, Breton showing a much greater deal of reshaping, e.g. with the collectives being all masculine and the singulatives being all feminine. This raises the question, whether and how gender assumes the function of structuring the noun lexicon together with number.

Breton will be examined synchronically at different stages; diachronic changes and developments will be compared afterwards and contrasted with the developments in Welsh and Cornish as well as in Irish. Foreign influences and the question of language contact have to be equally considered in this context, especially the corresponding developments in French.

These are just a few aspects to be treated within this project. The results will not only be relevant for the discipline of Celtic Linguistics but also for General Linguistics and Typology.

 

Associated project:

“Analyticisation of the Indigenous Languages of the British Isles and Ireland” directed by Prof. Hildegard L.C. Tristram

 

Publications

Singulativ und Kollektiv in den britannischen Sprachen. In Eurolinguistik. Entwicklungen und Perspektive. Akten der internationalen Tagung vom 30.9.-2.10.2007 in Leipzig. Hrsg. v. Uwe Hinrichs, Norbert Reiter und Siegfried Tornow. Wiesbaden 2009: 233-253 (Eurolinguistische Arbeiten 5).

Genus und Nominalaspekt. Historische Sprachforschung 122 (2009): 1-30.

Les dérivés avec gallois, cornique -yn(n)/-en(n), breton -enn, irlandais -ne: fonction et sémantique. La Bretagne Linguistique 15. Éd par Jean Le Dû, Nelly Blanchard. Brest 2010: CRBC.

forthcoming:

Gender of Abstract Noun Suffixes in the Brittonic Languages. Kollektivum und Femininum: Flexion oder Wortbildung? Zum Andenken an Johannes Schmidt. Hrsg. v. Sergio Neri, Roland Schumann. Leiden, Brill.

in preparation: Studien zu Genus und Wortbildung in den britannischen Sprachen.

 
 
 
 
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