Markku Filppula

The rise of it -clefting in English: areal-typological and contact-linguistic considerations

Recent areal and typological research has brought to light several syntactic features which English shares with the Celtic languages as well as some of its neighbouring western European languages, but not with (all of) its Germanic sister languages, especially German. This study focuses on one of them, viz. the so-called it -cleft construction. What makes the it -cleft construction particularly interesting from an areal and typological point of view is the fact that, although it does not belong to the defining features of so-called Standard Average European (SAE), it has a strong presence in French, which is in the ‘nucleus’ of languages forming SAE alongside Dutch, German, and (northern dialects of) Italian. In German, however, clefting has remained a marginal option, not to mention most of the eastern European languages which hardly make use of clefting at all. This division in itself prompts the question of some kind of a historical-linguistic connection between the Celtic languages (both Insular and Continental), English, and French (or, more widely, Romance languages). Before tackling that question, one has to establish whether it -clefting is part of Old (and Middle) English grammar, and if so, to what extent it is used in these periods. In the first part of this article (sections 2 and 3), I trace the emergence of it -clefts on the basis of data from The York–Toronto–Helsinki Corpus of Old English Prose and The Penn–Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English , second edition. Having established the gradually increasing use of it -clefts from OE to ME, I move on to discuss the areal distribution of clefting among European languages and its typological implications (section 4). This paves the way for a discussion of the possible role played by language contacts, and especially those with the Celtic languages, in the emergence of it -clefting in English (section 5). It is argued that contacts with the Celtic languages provide the most plausible explanation for the development of this feature of English. This conclusion is supported by the chronological precedence of the cleft construction in the Celtic languages, its prominence in modern-period ‘Celtic Englishes’, and close parallels between English and the Celtic languages with respect to several other syntactic features.

Special issue on Re-evaluating the Celtic hypothesis

Present-day historians of English are widely agreed that, throughout its recorded history, the English language has absorbed linguistic influences from other languages, most notably Latin, Scandinavian, and French. What may give rise to differing views is the nature and extent of these influences, not the existence of them. Against the backdrop of this unanimity, it seems remarkable that there is one group of languages for which no such consensus exists, despite a close coexistence between English and these languages in the British Isles spanning more than one and a half millennia. This group is, of course, the Insular Celtic languages, comprising the Brittonic subgroup of Welsh and Cornish and the Goidelic one comprising Irish, Manx, and Scottish Gaelic. The standard wisdom, repeated in textbooks on the history of English such as Baugh and Cable (1993), Pyles & Algeo (1993), and Strang (1970), holds that contact influences from Celtic have always been minimal and are mainly limited to Celtic-origin place names and river names and a mere handful of other words. Thus, Baugh & Cable (1993: 85) state that ‘outside of place-names the influence of Celtic upon the English language is almost negligible’; in a similar vein, Strang (1970) writes that ‘the extensive influence of Celtic can only be traced in place-names’ (1970: 391).

On the relationship between the cognitive and the communal: a complex systems perspective

This paper presents a specific take on the relationship between the global and the local in language. In particular, it draws a distinction between the cognitive and the communal plane of language representation and attempts to model the relationship between the two using complexity theory. To operationalise this relationship and examine it with corpus linguistic methods, it proposes a concept of a cognitive corpus, setting it against the more usual idea of a corpus as representing the language of a certain community of speakers. As a case study, the paper compares the properties of chunking at the cognitive and communal planes. The study shows that (1) chunks at the cognitive plane seem to be more fixed than at the communal, (2) their patterning at the communal plane can be seen as emergent from the patterning observable in individual languages, but that (3) there is also similarity in the shape of the patterning across the two planes. These findings suggest that although the processes leading to multi-word unit patterning are different at each of the planes, the similarity in the shape the patterning takes might be regarded as an indication of the fractal structure of language which is a common property of complex adaptive systems. For example, Zipf’s law, which is able to model the patterning at each of the planes, can be seen as one of the symptoms of such structure. Since the cognitive and the communal planes of language are in constant interaction with each other, such conceptualisation suggests intriguing implications for ongoing change in English and the role second language users might play in it. [A fractal is] a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole. Mandelbrot 1982: 34