Papers by Oliver Currie
Linguistica, 2023
This thematic issue of Linguistica explores the interaction between sociocultural change and the ... more This thematic issue of Linguistica explores the interaction between sociocultural change and the development of vernacular languages in Early Modern Europe. Its scope is deliberately broad in the range of topics, languages as well as in the time span covered from, at one end, the transition from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern period in the 15th century to, at the other end, the transition from the Early Modern to the Late Modern period in the 18th and 19th centuries. The leitmotiv of the issue – the development of vernacular languages – is explored from different perspectives, for different languages and at different periods. The languages covered include not only languages which were official or hegemonic in emerging European nation states – English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch – but also peripheral languages such as Slovene, Irish, Welsh, Scots, Low German, Catalan and Franco-Provençal. Several of the articles in this issue also focus on more than one vernacular language, exploring competition or contact between Latin and vernacular languages or between different vernacular languages and cultures.
). Intra-writer Variation in Historical Sociolinguistics, 2023
The sixteenth century Welsh Bible translations show striking intra-writer variation between the p... more The sixteenth century Welsh Bible translations show striking intra-writer variation between the poetic books of the Old Testament, which have frequent verb-initial order in positive declarative main clauses, and the prose books of the Old and New Testament, where this construction is rare. The Welsh Bible translators may have exploited existing linguistic variation – such verb-initial order was rare in prose but common in poet-ry – in a novel way, using a construction associated with poetry to give a poetic quality to prose translations of Biblical Hebrew poetry. While the meaning indexed by this style shifting appears to be primarily literary, the process of the style shifting is essentially sociolinguistic and the chapter argues for a rapprochement of sociolinguistic and literary con-cepts of style.
Language Dynamics in the Early Modern Period, Apr 26, 2022
This chapter explores how the revision of national myths in Early Modern Britain and France refle... more This chapter explores how the revision of national myths in Early Modern Britain and France reflects conflicts and contradictions between the perspectives of the dominant nations, England and France, and those of two subordinate nations, Wales and Brittany, formally annexed by their larger neighbours in the 16th century, and how the national myths in turn impinged on the status of the vernacular languages of the subordinate nations, Welsh and Breton. In order to legitimise the new Church of England, English protestant apologists claimed that its protestant faith was the continuation of the pure faith of the Early Church, which the ancient Britons, ancestors of the Welsh, had acquired directly from a disciple of Christ. Richard Davies’ preface to the 1567 Welsh New Testament, however, re-appropriated the narrative as specifically Welsh. Davies’ narrative was influential in Wales and contributed to a cultural context, together with the Welsh Bible translation, in which the Welsh language could flourish despite the increasing dominance of English. In the case of Brittany and France, the paper explores the contradiction between the antiquarian prestige conferred upon Breton by contemporary language antiquity myths and its actual subordinate sociolinguistic status vis-a-vis French.
Jezik in slovstvo, 2022
Bible translations have played a central role in language standardization processes, because the ... more Bible translations have played a central role in language standardization processes, because the Bible's unique authority as a text favoured the selection of the variety used in the Bible as a language standard and because the wider distribution the Bible enjoyed compared to other texts, in particular in Renaissance and Reformation Europe, then facilitated the diffusion of a biblical language standard. This article examines of the role of the Bible in language standardization processes focusing on a historical case study of Welsh. The language of the first complete Welsh Bible translation in 1588 is widely recognised to have formed the basis of standard literary Welsh, yet there has to date not been a systematic investigation of how the Welsh biblical standard developed or came to be adopted. The article reassesses the traditional, but unsubstantiated view that the language of the 1588 Bible translation was based on an existing medieval poetic literary standard and advances an alternative hypothesis that the biblical standard was essentially shaped by the process of revision of earlier translations, as the 1588 and ultimately canonical translation represented a reaction against the linguistic inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies of earlier translations of the New Testament and Psalms.
Journal for Foreign Languages, 2021
The study of the language of publication of folklore offers a unique perspective on the socioling... more The study of the language of publication of folklore offers a unique perspective on the sociolinguistic history of regional languages in 19th century France as well as on the wider cultural context of contemporary folklore collection. Regional languages had a subordinate sociolinguistic status vis-à-vis French, yet they had preserved a richer folklore heritage, which, during the golden age of folklore collection, was also considered to be a valuable part of French national cultural heritage. The fact that the folktales of regional languages were often published first or only in French translation reflects both the hegemonic position of French and the prevailing contemporary perception of folktales primarily as a universal human cultural inheritance rather than as the literary heritage of specific cultures; folktale publications were typically aimed at a wider national readership and the perceived universal content – tale types and motifs – was considered more important than the linguistic form and cultural context. However, the fact that folktale and above all folksong collections were also published in the original regional languages shows that there was a genuine choice of language of publication. The publication of folktales only in translation was controversial because the lack of original texts – as well as a lack of transparency concerning the collection process – potentially undermined the authenticity of the published folklore. The publication of folklore only in translation also resulted in the loss of an important part of the cultural heritage of the regional languages and its effective appropriation as French national and French language cultural heritage.
Ars & Humanitas, 2008
... zgodb je med drugim ka-talonska: jezik, ki je bil v ??asu frankizma prepovedan, je danes v ra... more ... zgodb je med drugim ka-talonska: jezik, ki je bil v ??asu frankizma prepovedan, je danes v razcvetu in v Kataloniji ??pan????ino oz. ... Da ima Mistral prav, pri??a zgodovina ??tevilnih evropskih narodov in hkrati zgodovina mnogih evropskih jezikov, morda tudi tista, ki je zaenkrat ??e ...
The notion of stability is central to grammatical description, since any categorisation of a lang... more The notion of stability is central to grammatical description, since any categorisation of a language as having a certain structural property takes for granted that this property is a stable one, regularly and consistently reflected in discourse in that language. Yet a precise, unambiguous interpretation of stability cannot itself be taken for granted, since it remains an open question how much variability can be allowed in the realisation of a ‘stable’ linguistic property. On the one hand, it is possible to associate stability with invariance, on the other hand, sociolinguistic studies have shown not only that there can also be stable patterns of variation, but also that ‘structured heterogeneity’ is actually the norm in language (Weinreich, Labov and Herzog 1968: 101). This central finding of sociolinguistics presents a challenge to our understanding of the notions of stability and change in all areas of language, and is one this article will explore in the specific area of word order. In the empirical investigation of word order stability and change we face a considerably more complex task, however, than in the investigation of phonological variation and of sound change in progress, which has been the usual domain of sociolinguistic study. First, the study of variation in the use of phonological variables was based on the assumption that ‘the variants are identical in truth, but opposed in their social and/or stylistic significance’ (Lavandera 1978: 174), whereas variant word orders do usually differ in meaning and pragmatic function. Second, it has been demonstrated that a multiplicity of factors contribute to word order variation — syntactic factors (e.g. type of clause, transitivity), pragmatic factors (e.g. topicality, focus), textual factors (e.g. genre), lexical and idiomatic factors — as well as sociolinguistic and stylistic factors. So in investigating sociolinguistic and stylistic variation in word order we do not simply have a two-dimensional puzzle to tackle (i.e. the relationship between form and social/stylistic significance), but a multidimensional one, in studying the interaction of sociolinguistic and stylistic variation with several other kinds of variation. Third, mainstream word order theory has tended to exclude sociolinguistic factors a priori from its analysis, and does not seem adequately equipped to deal with sociolinguistic variation. The present article is to show that the importance of sociolinguistic and stylistic variation has been underestimated in word order theory. Empirical evidence of this will be presented from a corpus-based study of Early Modern Welsh, where there is particularly striking stylistic variation in word order.
Synchrony and Diachrony. A Dynamic Interface., edited by Anna Giacalone Ramat, Caterina Mauri and Piera Molinelli [Studies in Language Companion Series 133] 2013, 2013
This article contrasts two different analyses – a diachronic Construction Grammar (CxG) approach ... more This article contrasts two different analyses – a diachronic Construction Grammar (CxG) approach and the Principles & Principles approach of Willis (1998) – of the development of a verb-initial construction, Absolute-initial verb (AIV) order, in Early Modern Welsh. The P&P approach attributes the rise of AIV order in Early Modern Welsh to an abrupt and discrete change in the grammaticality of V1 following the resetting of the V2 parameter. We argue, on the basis of a detailed corpus study of the period c.1550-c.1750, that the historical data shows a gradual increase as well as significant sociolinguistic variation in the frequency of use of AIV order. We further argue that a diachronic Construction Grammar approach can better account for gradual syntactic change and syntactic variation, since, unlike P&P approaches, it does not seek to model gradual historical data in terms of discrete grammars and grammatical categories, but has a gradient conception of grammaticality and grammatical categories and can thus propose gradual mechanisms of change and integrate sociolinguistic variation directly in grammatical description.
Translation Studies, 9:2. Special Issue on Translation in Wales, Mar 1, 2016
The traditional view of the language of the sixteenth-century Welsh Bible translations as unnatur... more The traditional view of the language of the sixteenth-century Welsh Bible translations as unnatural and conservative in having predominantly subject-verb, in contrast to the verb-initial word order of Modern Welsh, is essentially incorrect. This article shows that poetic books of the sixteenth-century Bible translations (e.g. Psalms, Song of Songs, Isaiah) were the first continuous Welsh prose texts to use frequent verb-initial order in affirmative main clauses and may have contributed to the development of a new literary prose style, characterized by frequent verb-initial word order. The translators may have adopted verb-initial word order from poetry, where it was common, to recreate a poetic quality in a prose translation of the original Hebrew poetry, reflecting a simultaneously domesticating and foreignizing strategy, in that it exploits a native linguistic feature in a novel way to reproduce exotic stylistic effects of the source text.
Thesis Chapters by Oliver Currie
PhD Thesis, University of Ljubljana, 2015
The history of Welsh word order has long been an issue of controversy. While some scholars have a... more The history of Welsh word order has long been an issue of controversy. While some scholars have argued that Welsh underwent as many as two major word order changes between the Old and Modern periods — from verb-initial to verb-medial and back to verb-initial again — others have maintained that Welsh has always been essentially verb-initial, disregarding the apparent non-verb-initial phase in the Middle and Early Modern Welsh periods as an artificial literary aberration. At the same time, there has until recently been little empirical study of Early Modern Welsh word order. This thesis provides a systematic empirical investigation of Early Modern Welsh word order from the mid sixteenth to the mid eighteenth centuries, based on an original corpus of over 100 texts of diverse genres, registers and discourse types, including Slander case records, personal letters, drama, the Bible translations, sermons, religious treatises, catechisms and pseudo-historical works. The investigation focuses on the diachronic development of one particular verb-initial construction Absolute-initial verb (AIV) order, where a finite verb comes in absolute initial position in a positive declarative main clause (PDMC). In Middle Welsh (c.1200–c.1500), AIV order was rare in prose, which had a predominantly verb-second or medial word order in positive declarative main clauses, but common in poetry. The corpus analysis shows that AIV order starts to be used more frequently in prose texts from the second half of the sixteenth century and that the first innovative texts to show a frequent use of AIV are the 1567 and 1588 Bible translations, in particular poetic books of the Old Testament such as Psalms, Isaiah, Song of Songs, contradicting the traditional view in Welsh scholarhip that the Bible translations were a conservative bastion of non-verb-initial word order. There is evidence of a continued increase in the use of AIV order in seventeenth and eighteenth century corpus texts, however at the same time we find extreme patterns of variation in the use of AIV order throughout the two century corpus period with some prose authors showing dominant AIV order in over 50% of PDMCs, other contemporary authors almost avoiding the construction altogether, as well as various intermediate patterns of usage.
We contrast the Principles and Parameters (P&P) account of this change in Welsh word order by Willis (1998), which seeks to explain the rise of AIV order in terms of a discrete and abrupt change in the grammaticality of the construction but which does not in itself seek to account for the variation in the use of the construction, with an alternative Construction Grammar (CxG) approach, where we posit a gradual mechanism of syntactic change and seek to propose an integrated syntactic and sociohistorical account of the change and variation in use of AIV order. In the Principles and Parameters approach, Middle Welsh is analysed as a V2 language, where unmarked VSO is ungrammatical in positive main clauses, and the emergence of grammatical unmarked VSO in Early Modern Welsh is attributed to the resetting of the V2 parameter, resulting in an abrupt change from a V2 grammar with ungrammatical unmarked VSO to a non-V2 grammar with grammatical unmarked VSO. In the Construction Grammar approach, AIV order is analysed as being a grammatical, but weakly motivated construction in Middle Welsh prose and the gradual increase as well as the variation in its use is analysed in terms of changing and competing motivations (both structural/syntactic and sociolinguistic/stylistic) for its use over time. We will argue that the Construction Grammar concept of motivation can be used as tool in the explanation of syntactic variation and change. In a Construction Grammar framework, it can be argued that AIV order was a well-formed construction in MW prose but a weakly-motivated one, as a system of pre-verbal fronting had come to be generalised: Subject/direct object + preverbal particle a + verb, and Adverbial phrase + preverbal particle y(d) + verb. Where, less frequently, there were finite-verb-initial constructions, the verb was usually preceded by the preverbal particle y(d), rather than occurring in absolute-initial position. In MW poetry the more frequent use of AIV order may have been motivated by specific cultural and stylistic factors (e.g. poetic tradition, metre). The increase in use of AIV order in EMnW seems at least in part to have been motivated by the gradual loss of the preverbal particle y(d): we find correlations between the frequency of use of AIV order and Adverb+Verb order – the use of Adverb+Verb order (i.e. without the particle y) appears to motivate AIV order and vice versa. The patterns of variation further suggest that AIV order appears to have been perceived as interchangeable with two other constructions: Pronominal Subject+Verb and Dummy subject+Verb, and came to be used in all the contexts where these other two constructions were used. The perceived interchangeability of AIV and these constructions seems to have provided Early Modern Welsh writers with a stylistic resource which they exploited in different ways, some choosing to generalise the construction, others to avoid it. A perceived association of AIV order with poetry may have been a motivating factor for its use for some authors, particularly in the 16th century prose translations of the Psalms, where the AIV order may have been used to evoke a poetic style in a prose text and perhaps also render more closely the verb-initial patterns in the original Hebrew poetry.
Conference Presentations by Oliver Currie
This paper seeks to reassess two often repeated views concerning the language of the sixteenth ce... more This paper seeks to reassess two often repeated views concerning the language of the sixteenth century Welsh Bible translations, in particular the 1588 Bible: first, that it was modelled on that of cywydd metre poetry (as argued by R. Geraint Gruffydd, Thomas Parry, J. Lloyd-Jones and Isaac Thomas) and second, that it was conservative in maintaining predominantly subject-verb order (e.g., R. Geraint Gruffydd; Robert A. Fowkes; David W.E. Willis), compared to the characteristic verb-initial order of Modern Welsh. Despite being of key interest to understanding the development of the modern standard language, these assumptions have not generally been systematically investigated.
We will show that, contrary to the traditional view, the Welsh sixteenth-century Bible translations were innovative in comparison with contemporary prose texts. Some of these, in particular Old Testament books translated from Hebrew poetry (e.g. Psalms, Song of Songs, Isaiah) were the first continuous prose texts in Welsh to show frequent verb-initial order in positive declarative main clauses. This innovative use of verb-initial order, as well as being an indicator of language change in progress, may reflect poetic influence. Verb-initial order was common in contemporary and earlier poetry but rare in prose and could thus have been perceived as a poetic linguistic feature and in turn exploited by the Bible translators to give a poetic quality to a prose translation of Hebrew poetry. We will also examine briefly William Morgan’s linguistic changes when revising the 1567 New Testament and Psalms to shed light on whether he may have selected higher register variants using poetry as a model.
Uploads
Papers by Oliver Currie
Thesis Chapters by Oliver Currie
We contrast the Principles and Parameters (P&P) account of this change in Welsh word order by Willis (1998), which seeks to explain the rise of AIV order in terms of a discrete and abrupt change in the grammaticality of the construction but which does not in itself seek to account for the variation in the use of the construction, with an alternative Construction Grammar (CxG) approach, where we posit a gradual mechanism of syntactic change and seek to propose an integrated syntactic and sociohistorical account of the change and variation in use of AIV order. In the Principles and Parameters approach, Middle Welsh is analysed as a V2 language, where unmarked VSO is ungrammatical in positive main clauses, and the emergence of grammatical unmarked VSO in Early Modern Welsh is attributed to the resetting of the V2 parameter, resulting in an abrupt change from a V2 grammar with ungrammatical unmarked VSO to a non-V2 grammar with grammatical unmarked VSO. In the Construction Grammar approach, AIV order is analysed as being a grammatical, but weakly motivated construction in Middle Welsh prose and the gradual increase as well as the variation in its use is analysed in terms of changing and competing motivations (both structural/syntactic and sociolinguistic/stylistic) for its use over time. We will argue that the Construction Grammar concept of motivation can be used as tool in the explanation of syntactic variation and change. In a Construction Grammar framework, it can be argued that AIV order was a well-formed construction in MW prose but a weakly-motivated one, as a system of pre-verbal fronting had come to be generalised: Subject/direct object + preverbal particle a + verb, and Adverbial phrase + preverbal particle y(d) + verb. Where, less frequently, there were finite-verb-initial constructions, the verb was usually preceded by the preverbal particle y(d), rather than occurring in absolute-initial position. In MW poetry the more frequent use of AIV order may have been motivated by specific cultural and stylistic factors (e.g. poetic tradition, metre). The increase in use of AIV order in EMnW seems at least in part to have been motivated by the gradual loss of the preverbal particle y(d): we find correlations between the frequency of use of AIV order and Adverb+Verb order – the use of Adverb+Verb order (i.e. without the particle y) appears to motivate AIV order and vice versa. The patterns of variation further suggest that AIV order appears to have been perceived as interchangeable with two other constructions: Pronominal Subject+Verb and Dummy subject+Verb, and came to be used in all the contexts where these other two constructions were used. The perceived interchangeability of AIV and these constructions seems to have provided Early Modern Welsh writers with a stylistic resource which they exploited in different ways, some choosing to generalise the construction, others to avoid it. A perceived association of AIV order with poetry may have been a motivating factor for its use for some authors, particularly in the 16th century prose translations of the Psalms, where the AIV order may have been used to evoke a poetic style in a prose text and perhaps also render more closely the verb-initial patterns in the original Hebrew poetry.
Conference Presentations by Oliver Currie
We will show that, contrary to the traditional view, the Welsh sixteenth-century Bible translations were innovative in comparison with contemporary prose texts. Some of these, in particular Old Testament books translated from Hebrew poetry (e.g. Psalms, Song of Songs, Isaiah) were the first continuous prose texts in Welsh to show frequent verb-initial order in positive declarative main clauses. This innovative use of verb-initial order, as well as being an indicator of language change in progress, may reflect poetic influence. Verb-initial order was common in contemporary and earlier poetry but rare in prose and could thus have been perceived as a poetic linguistic feature and in turn exploited by the Bible translators to give a poetic quality to a prose translation of Hebrew poetry. We will also examine briefly William Morgan’s linguistic changes when revising the 1567 New Testament and Psalms to shed light on whether he may have selected higher register variants using poetry as a model.
We contrast the Principles and Parameters (P&P) account of this change in Welsh word order by Willis (1998), which seeks to explain the rise of AIV order in terms of a discrete and abrupt change in the grammaticality of the construction but which does not in itself seek to account for the variation in the use of the construction, with an alternative Construction Grammar (CxG) approach, where we posit a gradual mechanism of syntactic change and seek to propose an integrated syntactic and sociohistorical account of the change and variation in use of AIV order. In the Principles and Parameters approach, Middle Welsh is analysed as a V2 language, where unmarked VSO is ungrammatical in positive main clauses, and the emergence of grammatical unmarked VSO in Early Modern Welsh is attributed to the resetting of the V2 parameter, resulting in an abrupt change from a V2 grammar with ungrammatical unmarked VSO to a non-V2 grammar with grammatical unmarked VSO. In the Construction Grammar approach, AIV order is analysed as being a grammatical, but weakly motivated construction in Middle Welsh prose and the gradual increase as well as the variation in its use is analysed in terms of changing and competing motivations (both structural/syntactic and sociolinguistic/stylistic) for its use over time. We will argue that the Construction Grammar concept of motivation can be used as tool in the explanation of syntactic variation and change. In a Construction Grammar framework, it can be argued that AIV order was a well-formed construction in MW prose but a weakly-motivated one, as a system of pre-verbal fronting had come to be generalised: Subject/direct object + preverbal particle a + verb, and Adverbial phrase + preverbal particle y(d) + verb. Where, less frequently, there were finite-verb-initial constructions, the verb was usually preceded by the preverbal particle y(d), rather than occurring in absolute-initial position. In MW poetry the more frequent use of AIV order may have been motivated by specific cultural and stylistic factors (e.g. poetic tradition, metre). The increase in use of AIV order in EMnW seems at least in part to have been motivated by the gradual loss of the preverbal particle y(d): we find correlations between the frequency of use of AIV order and Adverb+Verb order – the use of Adverb+Verb order (i.e. without the particle y) appears to motivate AIV order and vice versa. The patterns of variation further suggest that AIV order appears to have been perceived as interchangeable with two other constructions: Pronominal Subject+Verb and Dummy subject+Verb, and came to be used in all the contexts where these other two constructions were used. The perceived interchangeability of AIV and these constructions seems to have provided Early Modern Welsh writers with a stylistic resource which they exploited in different ways, some choosing to generalise the construction, others to avoid it. A perceived association of AIV order with poetry may have been a motivating factor for its use for some authors, particularly in the 16th century prose translations of the Psalms, where the AIV order may have been used to evoke a poetic style in a prose text and perhaps also render more closely the verb-initial patterns in the original Hebrew poetry.
We will show that, contrary to the traditional view, the Welsh sixteenth-century Bible translations were innovative in comparison with contemporary prose texts. Some of these, in particular Old Testament books translated from Hebrew poetry (e.g. Psalms, Song of Songs, Isaiah) were the first continuous prose texts in Welsh to show frequent verb-initial order in positive declarative main clauses. This innovative use of verb-initial order, as well as being an indicator of language change in progress, may reflect poetic influence. Verb-initial order was common in contemporary and earlier poetry but rare in prose and could thus have been perceived as a poetic linguistic feature and in turn exploited by the Bible translators to give a poetic quality to a prose translation of Hebrew poetry. We will also examine briefly William Morgan’s linguistic changes when revising the 1567 New Testament and Psalms to shed light on whether he may have selected higher register variants using poetry as a model.