"Dialogue is a key element in narration: be it a fairy tale, a short story or a novel, the characters usually speak. In literary text, dialogue and narrative are closely interwoven.

Some syntactical features of the interface between narrative and dialogue in Modern Literary Welsh will be examined in this paper, on the basis of ‘Te yn y Grug’ (1959) by Kate Roberts (1891–1985). This text-linguistic domain is hitherto unexplored in Welsh.

Narrative and dialogue (‘Erzählen’ and ‘Besprechen’ in Weinrich (1971); ‘histoire’ and ‘discours’ in Benveniste (1971)) are two principal and complex textemes (that is, signalled and bounded units manifesting distinctive and complete (sub-)systems of grammar). Studying the mutual connections between them is of great importance to both general linguistics and our understanding of the text-grammatical system of Welsh (and of ‘Te yn y Grug’ in particular).

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"In 1588 William Morgan published his monumental Welsh translation of the Bible. This impressive work is quite atypical of the contemporary Bible translations, as the Old Testament was translated directly from the original Hebrew. This fact invites contrastive study of the Welsh and Hebrew texts, which may shed light on the Welsh text and language, the translation process, and (the translator's reading of) the original text.

In this paper I will attempt a close examination of the semantic field of hearing in the Welsh translation of the Pentateuch in comparison with the Hebrew text. A special attention will be given to the means by which Morgan translated the Hebrew verb šmʿ (‘hear’), using the Welsh lexemes clywed and gwꝛando. Apart from some neutralising environments, there seems to be a meaning-bearing lexical opposition between clywed and gwꝛando: a meaningful choice the translator had to make every time he encountered this Hebrew verb. I hope the proposed description, which is based on formal-structural grounds and aims at understanding (Bible) translations through the lens of structural linguistic analysis, will contribute to our understanding of the 1588 Bible and its language.

Presentation: http://digitalwords.net/handouts/2011-08-04p.pdf

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In 1588 William Morgan published his monumental Welsh translation of the Bible. This work is notable, among other aspects, in that it has the Old Testament translated directly from the original Hebrew. This fact invites comparative study of the Welsh and Hebrew texts, which may shed light on the Welsh text and language, the translation process, and (the translator’s reading of) the original text.

In this paper I will attempt a close examination of the lexical means by which Morgan translated Hebrew phrases concerning the senses (chiefly verbs of perception). The Hebrew and the Welsh lexicon and grammar are structured differently; that obliges the translator to make constant meaning-bearing choices, interpreting the text according to their reading thereof. Structural description of Morgan’s lexical choices will be at the heart of the paper.

I hope the proposed description, which is based on formal linguistic grounds and aims at understanding (Bible) translations through the lens of structural linguistic analysis, will contribute to our understanding of the 1588 Bible and its language.

(This paper broadens the scope of a paper delivered at ICCS14, in which the semantic field of ‘hearing’ was in focus. Attendance at the previous paper is not required nor assumed.)

Description of the syntactical structures in Old English, in which the demonstrative pronouns (se, seo, þæt and þes, þeos, þis) occur independently of a following nominal phrase: structural classification, characterization and analysis of their internal structure and their function in the text by a comprehensive examination of the examples in the corpus, Ælfric’s Lives of Saints.

Such an exhaustive survey of the relevant examples in a text of this length has never been done. A clearer, more complete profile of the functions of the pronouns in question emerges from it, with hitherto undescribed findings. These contribute to a subtler understanding of Ælfric’s language, on a structural linguistic basis.

Most languages of Europe, either within the Standard Average European Sprachbund or not, have a T-V distinction (Brown and Gilman 1960; Helmbrecht 2013). This means that when addressing an allocutor, the speaker has to choose between a ‘familiar’ T-form (2sg.fam; cf. Fr. ‘tu’) or a ‘polite’ or ‘formal’ V-form (2sg.hon, commonly homonymic with 2pl; cf. Fr. ‘vous’). Welsh (Indo-European, Celtic) has such a distinction (‘ti’ being a T-form; ‘chi’ a V-form), while English (Indo-European, Germanic) ‘you’ has not. Thus, when translating from English into Welsh, translators are obliged to make politeness distinctions according to their understanding of the text in order to produce an idiomatic output.

The present study uses the Welsh translation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling 2003) as a corpus and describes aspects of the Welsh T-V system, as reflected by the ways the translator conveyed sociopragmatic information using the Welsh second person.

In total, there are 1393 occurrences of ‘you’, ‘your’, ‘yourself’ etc. in the original text. By tagging them with ‘speaker’, ‘addressee’ and ‘ti:chi’ information (i.e. who speaks to whom how), an intricate map of sociopragmatic relationships emerges. Imperatives in the translation, which do distinguish ‘ti:chi’ but do not correspond to occurrences of ‘you’, have been taken into account as well. Using this map three topics are addressed, with attestation by examples from the text:

* Change in address form.
Transitioning from one address form to the other as a linguistic signal for a change in the relationship between characters.

* Unidentified or non-specific addressee.
The ‘ti:chi’ opposition is grounded in the concrete pragmatic situation. When the addressee is unidentified (e.g. addressing someone knocking on the door) or non-specific (e.g. addressing non-specific readers), ‘chi’ is used exclusively, ‘ti’ being too loaded.

* Age and status.
Belonging to the boarding school story genre, the corpus offers us an opportunity to examine the linguistic expression of social relationships in which age plays a major role. Three sub-topics: the ways students and teachers address each other, intra-familial relationships, and the use of ‘chi’ by grown-ups in establishing the child protagonist as a famous, admired personality.

This study is a part of a comparative typological project using translations of the first Harry Potter book, which was translated into 74 languages, as means to explore the sociopragmatics of second person in languages with a T-V system (see Haspelmath 2010; Stolz 2007).

In recent years, as the question of the nature of Case assignment has come into focus, the question of Case typology in general, and ergative Case marking (and agreement) systems in particular, has come to be seen as very important. The interdependence between typology and theory is perhaps nowhere clearer than in the area of Case. On one hand, a typology without a theoretical basis is merely descriptive and cannot lead us to a true understanding of the reasons for whatever typological generalizations are discovered. On the other hand, a (generative) theory of Case, which aims to be a model of the Case component of Universal Grammar and not just a theoretically elegant description of familiar types of Case, has to be able to predict the typological facts; a clear understanding of typology is necessary to be able to do this. One fact that has become clear from typological studies of Case is that a model based only on the familiar nominative-accusative pattern is doomed to be inadequate as an expression of universal Case theory.

Despite my disagreement with his conclusions, this paper has benefitted greatly from Chris Manning's study of ergativity . I would like to thank Joan Bresnan for comments on an earlier version of this paper. All the usual disclaimers apply. 1 Both Schachter and Dixon make additional claims, more inimical to the LFG conception of syntax, which I do not address here and do not subscribe to. Schachter, at least by implication, questions the universality of grammatical functions in general. It seems to me that that step is not justified by the facts of Philippine-type languages and ergative languages. Dixon claims that his subject and pivot are defined in terms of the more primitive functions S, A and O. Here again, I do not believe that a valid case has been made. http://pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il/~msyfalk/ Grammatical functions lie at the heart of syntax. Traditional notions of grammatical functions are based primarily on the facts of fairly canonical nominative-accusative languages. Since it is this traditional kind of approach that has formed the basis of modern theories of grammatical functions, such as that assumed by LFG, it is important to subject it to critical consideration based on typological different languages.

January 2002 draft. Thanks to Edit Doron for comments on an earlier version. Comments welcome. 1 We use the term "nominal phrase" as a pretheoretical term which is neutral with respect to the formal categorial analysis as NP or DP. We accept the analysis of English nominal phrases as DP, but will argue that in Hebrew they are NP.

I will use the term wh construction in this paper for this family of constructions, and, to remain theory-neutral, I will use the expression "involved in a wh dependency" in place of such expressions as "undergoing wh movement" or the equivalent in other theoretical frameworks.