Stephens (1990)

De Arbres
  • Stephens, Janig. 1990. 'Non-finite Clauses in Breton', Ball, Fife, Poppe, Rowland (éds.), Celtic Linguistics: Readings in the Brythonic Languages, Festschrift for T. Arwyn Watkins, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 68, Benjamins, 151-166.


 Introduction:
 "This paper examines the order of constituents in infinitival clauses which occur both as embedded clauses and independent clauses. Although Breton is a VSO language (Stephens 1982, Borsley & Stephens 1989), the paper will show that the order of constituents in infinitival clauses is SVO.
 
 I shall argue, as Sproat (1985) does for Welsh, that the Government and Binding theory (hence GB) of Chomsky (1981) provides a natural explanation for the difference in surface word order in finite and non-finite clauses. The paper is organised as follows. The aspects of GB relevant to the analysis are presented in section 1, followed by a presentation of the data in section 2. In section 3, I shall examine the order of constituents in three types of embedded clauses:
 
 i) complement clauses introduced by a prepositional complementizer,
 ii) clauses complement to control verb, and
 iii) complement clauses with exceptional case-marking.
 
 Section 4 deals with the analysis of non-finite independent clauses, those introduced by da and those introduced by ha. Section 5 is a summary of the discussion and concludes that, in Breton, finite and non-finite clauses have a different word order: VSO and SVO respectively."


errata

  • p. 159. ex. (39) a un article erratique
Lezel a ra Lenaig ar anezho da lenn al lizher. > Lezel a ra Lenaig anezho da lenn al lizher.
  • p.155. ex. (17) dans la traduction, le sujet n'est pas him mais Yann.