Stephens (1990)

De Arbres
  • Stephens, J. 1990. ‘Non-finite Clauses in Breton’, Celtic Linguistics: Readings in the Brythonic Languages, Ball, Fife, Poppe, Rowland, 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 finitie 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."