Abstract: It has generally been assumed that Celtic influences in English grammar over the centuries have been minimal. The last couple of decades, however, have witnessed a continuing rise of interest in the 'Celtic Hypothesis', which argues for a need to reassess the role of the Celtic languages in the development of English. In this chapter we explicate the Celtic Hypothesis through a discussion of two syntactic features which in our view are likely to have arisen as a result of either direct or indirect (reinforcing) Celtic influence, leaving its mark on English grammar in two waves: first in the early medieval period, and later in the modern contact periods. These features are the progressive or 'expanded' form of verbs and the it-cleft construction. We argue that the commonalities between the histories and later developments of these features are such that they provide evidence for continued contact influences between Celtic and English.
Publication Year: 2017
Publication Date: 2017-10-22
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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