Grammatical Number in Welsh

Silva Nurmio received her BA and MPhil degrees from Aberystwyth University before completing her PhD at the University of Cambridge. She spent a year during her doctoral studies as a visiting researcher at Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany. Her MPhil and doctoral theses focused on Welsh (Celtic, Indo-European), with comparative work with the other Celtic languages. During her first postdoctoral position at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies she started broadening her work on grammatical number to general linguistics and typology. Her current postdoctoral project at the University of Helsinki looks at the typology of singulatives.

• AbbreviationsCorporaGrammatical glossesAcknowledgements 1.  Introduction1.1 The scope and purpose of the book1.2 Welsh and the Celtic languages1.3 Sources and methodology 2. Grammatical number in Welsh2.1 Singular and plural: the main number distinction2.1.1 Agreement targets2.2 Initial consonant mutations 3. The ‘dual’3.1 Introduction3.2 The minor dual in Middle Welsh3.2.1 Minor duals in the sample and beyond3.3 The Breton dual3.3.1 The Breton ‘plural-duals’, plurals of duals and possible Welsh parallels3.4 Comparison of the Welsh and Breton duals3.5 Irish duals and the loss of the dual3.6 The dual from a cross-linguistic perspective3.6.1 Semitic languages3.6.2 Russian3.6.3 The ‘elliptical dual’ and ‘paral’ in Indo-European languages3.7 Conclusion 4. Morphological collectives and singulatives4.1 Introduction to collective nouns in Welsh and in Celtic4.1.1 Lexical collectives (or “corporate nouns”)4.1.2 Morphological collectives in the corpus4.1.3 Treatment of collective nouns in previous literature4.2 Is the collective a number category in Welsh?4.2.1 Agreement and morphological characteristics of the morphological collectives4.2.2 Perceptual salience4.2.3 Frequency and markedness4.2.4 Semantics4.2.5 Diachronic stability of morphological collectives and acquisition4.3 Morphosemantic analysis of the suffixes -yn and -en4.3.1 Singulative4.3.2 Diminutive4.3.3 Hypocoristic4.3.4 Changes in category: adjective → noun and verb → noun4.3.5 Noun → noun4.3.6 ‑yn/-en added to loanwords from English (and sometimes other languages)4.3.7 ‑yn/‑en add a person denotation4.3.8 Variant suffixes: ‑cyn/‑cen and -an4.3.9 Suppletion and the rise of new -yn/-en forms4.3.10 Conclusion: singulatives4.4 Inflection of morphological collectives and singulatives4.4.1 Pluralized singulatives4.4.2 Semantic categories and pluralized collectives4.4.3 Nouns with marked singular and plural forms4.5 Alternative for the singulative? Classifier-like constructions in Welsh and in Celtic4.6 Welsh collective nouns in a cross-linguistic perspective4.6.1 Dagaare4.6.2 Germanic languages4.6.3 Arabic4.6.4 The semantics of the diminutive cross-linguistically4.7 Conclusion 5. Mass nouns5.1 Introduction5.1.1 Previous scholarship on mass nouns in the Brittonic languages5.1.2 Tests for distinguishing different noun categories5.2 Mass nouns in text corpora5.3 Fieldwork5.3.1 Results5.3.2 Discussion5.4 Theoretical approaches to mass nouns5.4.1 Mass and count are features of noun phrases, not of nouns5.4.2 Gradience within the nominal system5.4.3 The typology of pluralized mass nouns5.5 Conclusion 6. Number agreement in Welsh: adjectives6.1 Introduction6.2 Plural adjectives in the sample: formations, functions and frequencies6.2.1 Plural adjectives in Breton and Cornish6.2.2 Order of noun and adjective6.3 Plural adjectives: inflection and derivation6.3.1 Plurals of adjectives in -edig6.3.2 Substantival plural adjectives in -(i)aid6.4  Genre, register and language: plural adjectives as a case study6.4.1 Plural adjectives in the Brut y Brenhinedd translations6.4.2 Plural adjectives in poetry6.5 Some Modern Welsh developments6.6 Conclusion 7. Number agreement in Welsh: numeral phrases7.1. Introduction7.2 Nouns with a numerative in Middle (and Old) Welsh7.2.1. Time expressions with numerals: blwyddyn ‘year’ and dydd ‘day’7.3 Numeral phrases in Middle Breton and Middle Cornish7.4 Numeral phrases in Irish7.5 Animacy and frequency7.6 Conclusion 8. ConclusionList of textual sourcesReferences    Index