Nurmio & Russel (2021)

• Nurmio, Silva & Paul Russell. 2021. 'Brittonic', K. Götz, W. Hock & P. Widmer (éds), Comparison and Gradation in Indo-European, Mouton Handbooks of Indo-European Typology 1, de Gruyter, Berlin, 201-224, texte, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110641325-008.

étude de la gradation, des structures équatives, comparatives et superlatives dans le groupe linguistique brittonique.

 Summary:
 "Several points arise from this discussion of gradation in Brittonic languages; some are

practical and others are of greater linguistic interest.

 Among the former is the issue of the patchiness of the data and the difficulty of finding

examples of features which one suspects are actually in the language(s). In part this is because for all these languages far-ranging and thorough databases are only just beginning to be developed and so it is simply not easy to find things.

 Two points are worth noting in the latter category. First, the complexity of the structures

involved in equatives, and also their historical origins; much more work is needed on this. Secondly, the rise of analytical parameter markers in the comparatives and superlatives is evidenced very late, often in the early modern period. One might wonder whether they are really that late or whether they operated from an earlier period at a sub-literary level and only later on surfaced in texts. While such markers could easily have arisen independently, because they appear in Latin, English and French, the languages with which speakers of Brittonic languages came into contact at various periods, they could also have arisen through contact."