Irish has a number of features such as VSO word order and initial mutations that make study of the acquisition of Irish morphosyntax particularly interesting to theories of child language development and, more recently, to language change. The chapter opens with a brief overview of Irish morphosyntax. We then outline and critically review studies of Irish morphosyntactic development over four main periods: (1) historical informal research on Irish acquisition; (2) studies of monolingual or strongly Irish-dominant acquisition; (3) a transition phase; and (4) more recent studies of acquisition in what have now become mainly simultaneous bilingual contexts. The findings of these studies are discussed in the light of the international literature and their contribution to our understanding of child language acquisition in general and Celtic languages in particular. The implications of these studies for language support and education are discussed, and future areas for research are considered.

Welsh grammar is characterised by an interesting set of morphosyntactic structures. Unique features within these structures distinguish Welsh – along with Irish and Scottish Gaelic – from other Indo-European varieties, and these differences offer a novel lens through which we can explore how language is learned. How children acquire the structures of Welsh, and how these structures are used by adults, has been the focus of a growing body of research over the past few years. The results of these studies have helped shape our understanding of the linguistic profiles of different types of bilingual Welsh-English speakers, in terms of their rate and pattern(s) of learning, and have highlighted some of the key factors influencing potential and achieved linguistic outcomes when learning within a minoritised bilingual context, contributing new and important insights into the various theoretical debates in the field. In this chapter, we outline how various morphosyntactic structures work in Welsh, and provide an overview of what is known from the current literature about L1 and L2 acquisition of Welsh morphosyntax, as spoken by both typically and atypically developing bilinguals. The different types of methodologies that have been applied to the study of Welsh grammar with adults and children will be discussed throughout, and suggestions for future studies presented at the end.

Chapter 7 surveys the various Balkanisms that emerge from a consideration of the syntax of the Balkan languages. Particular attention is given to the ordering of elements in phrases and sentences, the syntax of clitics and the “little words” that play such a key role in Balkan syntax, and various types of sentence-combining, especially subordination (complementation) and coordination, but parataxis as well. Three key aspects of Balkan syntax—the loss of the infinitive and its replacement by finite verbs, impersonal constructions, and the narrative use of imperatives—are discussed at length.

All his life, Hopkins was either student or teacher of the Classics. School, university, teaching posts, and finally a professorship in Dublin meant that he was engaged professionally with Latin and Greek almost without intermission. There are subjects, topics, or words in his writings which obviously derive directly from those studies, and there are approaches which were plainly learned from his experience. Specific examples of influence are betrayed by words and ideas, but the influence is perhaps more general; in word order, for example, or in the idea of poetry as speech, which connects with his discovery and use of Sprung Rhythm. His understanding of rhythm is the most important thing which his classical studies nurtured. In his university training and in his own teaching rhythm was a central concern. The Classics gave him models to follow, but they also freed him from some conventions of English poetry, which allowed him to write in an original style.

This chapter outlines the linguistic properties of Welsh and its historical and sociolinguistic context. It sketches the main features of Welsh phonology, including vowel, diphthong and consonant phoneme inventories, focusing on issues involving vowel length, the complex set of diphthongs, and voiceless nasal consonants, including major dialect differences. Mutation, changes in word-initial consonants triggered by morphosyntactic features, is a characteristic of Welsh that has drawn considerable attention, and both phonological and morphosyntactic aspects of the phenomenon are discussed. In morphology, topics of interest include extensive regular vowel alternation and the formation of the singular–plural distinction. Mildly synthetic verbal morphology sits alongside another typologically significant property, inflection of prepositions for person and number. Major features of Welsh syntax include head-initial and VSO word order, restrictions on finite verbs in complement clauses, an elaborate system of clause-initial particles, and marking of predicate adjectives and nominals with a dedicated predicative particle. A final section looks at current sociolinguistic issues, including changes in the traditional diglossic relationship between literary and spoken Welsh, and changes that are often attributed to language contact and revitalisation.

As children add words, they also add more specificity to their utterances, hence more complexity. They start to combine words with gestures, then words with other words. They advance from one word at a time to sequences of words and then combine these under the same intonation contour. The early composition of children’s vocabulary is strongly affected by adult input, and this may determine the proportions of nouns, verbs, and adjectives available to children early on. Their early constructions are limited in scope, tied to specific lexical items. Conversational exchanges at this stage often depend on adult scaffolding. Children distinguish ‘given’ from ‘new’ information, making use of word order and stress, as well as information from inflections, to identify word classes. Early word combinations in their first constructions are very similar across languages in the meanings expressed. Early combinations may be viewed as frozen forms, as intermediate forms, and as constructed forms, depending on their history in each child’s speech. Children learn to put together new combinations as they talk with adults and so discover more of the options in the language being acquired.

The chapter presents a broad overview of current research on the formal properties of Slavic languages developing in heritage language settings. Representative studies on heritage Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Serbian, and Croatian are synthesized along the following grammatical dimensions. In the nominal and verbal domains, I review properties of the heritage Slavic case and gender systems and the encoding of temporal distinctions through aspect and tense morphology. At the levels of sentence organization and discourse structure, I survey word order change pertaining to the syntax of clitics and the placement of clausal constituents to convey information-structural distinctions. The concluding discussion identifies the key overarching principles underlying the changes attested across the surveyed linguistic varieties and outlines directions for future studies in heritage Slavic linguistics.

We shed light on the question of how narrow information (F) and contrastive focus (CF) are intonationally and syntactically realized by heritage speakers (HSs) of Peninsular Spanish (PS) who have German as their second L1, and compare their data to those of monolingual speakers (MSs) of PS. Results from a production experiment show clear differences between the groups with respect to preferred syntactic strategies and, consequently, the intonational realization of focal pitch accents. The preferred strategy of HSs is stress shift, followed by p-movement and simple clefts, for both focus types. Conversely, MSs mostly use different strategies for each focus type; that is, pseudo-clefts and p-movement for F, and simple clefts and focus fronting for CF. Interestingly, stress shift is not a relevant option. The attested differences support the view that the interface between discourse on one hand, and syntax and phonology on the other, is challenging for bilingual speakers (Sorace, 2011).

Chapter 4 looks at the concepts of iconicity and image schemas. Iconicity refers to a phenomenon that illustrates natural resemblance between language and concepts and demonstrates direct correspondence between the linguistic form and the meaning to be conveyed. For instance, we tend to state events based on the temporal sequence of their actual occurrence. And linguistic distance often corresponds to conceptual distance. We use longer utterances iconic of “distance” to show politeness when talking to new acquaintances. Image schemas, as the bridge between sensorimotor experience and concepts, are the preconceptual structures derived from our sensorimotor experiences, through which we can structure abstract concepts and carry out inferences. This chapter discusses through a variety of examples how iconicity and image schemas can be useful in facilitating language learning.

Chapter 7 evaluates the force of a first argument in favor of the Innateness Hypothesis: the argument from universals. We will distinguish various types of universals, and examples will be provided. We will first look back at the organization of the mental grammar and ask which parts of that system could be innate. It is then made clear that we need to critically examine when alleged universals can be safely used to support the Innateness Hypothesis. We learn that the argument from universals has to be applied with care and without falling into logical fallacies. We need to realize that alleged universal properties of languages may, firstly, be applicable more generally to cognitive systems that include language (in which case they are not language-domain specific) and, secondly, be caused by factors that have nothing to do with the proposed innate Universal Grammar that nativists postulate. To use a universal in support of the Innateness Hypothesis, it needs to be specific to language and not be explainable in terms of other factors. We also see how Chomsky’s ideas about what might be innate for language have changed over time.

The chapter investigates the factors motivating the choice of mood in Early Latin indirect questions. Under what conditions would the speaker use the indicative rather than the subjunctive? subjunctive? Some factors have already been identified, such as exclamatory-style phrases, the degree of detachment of the indirect question, the head verb’s meaning and its mood. The present study submits that variation in mood can be motivated by (literary) register and the social identity of speaker and addressee. The question is addressed first by building a complete corpus of indirect questions in Early Latin drama, with each form tagged with the relevant markers (metrical context, status of speaker and addressee, etc.); from this corpus of data, instances in which indicative is most definitely retained as a rule are excluded, and instances are examined in which either mood was in principle allowable, with a view to identifying patterns. Attention is paid to style, metre, character type, and genre. This methodology enables a sociolinguistic approach to the question and considerations about the developments in usage over time.

This chapter introduces the concept of grammar of a particular language. The basic units of grammar in Chinese are introduced in order to underline the distinguishing characteristics of Chinese grammar. By comparing Chinese with English, the chapter demonstrates that Chinese words have no form changes in sentences regardless of quantity or tense; thus, the relationship between words plays an important role in determining their parts of speech.