Jim McCloskey, Professor and Chair of the Department of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Cruz
Fri Apr 9, 3:30pm, KCB 101
“Yes, No, and the Construction of Finite Verbs in a VSO Language”
Irish is one of those languages often said to lack words for ‘Yes’ and ‘No’. Where other languages use such words, Irish instead uses so-called ‘responsive forms of the verb’—single word sentences consisting only of an inflected verb. This talk addresses the following two related questions:
1. How does the grammatical device of the `responsive’ relate to the polarity particles (words like ‘Yes’ and `No’) found in other languages? Put differently, why is it possible to render with these single word sentences what other languages render by means of words like ‘Yes’ and ‘No’?
2. How does this effect relate to, and interact with, the single most famous fact about Irish, namely that it is a VSO language?