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This paper examines subject-verb agreement in Early-Irish sentences with coordinate subjects. We claim that Early Irish (Old and Middle Irish) is a 'variable agreement' language, which exhibits both singular and plural agreement with coordinate subjects. The type of agreement depends on adjacency between subject and verb and the valency of the verb. In particular, unaccusative and passive verbs exhibit both singular and plural agreement more frequently than transitive verbs. We argue that this is due to the availability of a default third person singular null locative expletive item, which controls singular agreement. Moreover, unaccusative and passive verbs also allow locative inversion with other PPs, leading to the same singular agreement. Furthermore, we suggest that, in contrast to Modern Irish, which lacks such an expletive, Early Irish could license its presence in intransitive/passive sentences because that stage of the language exhibited EPP-effects.

This article discusses similar developments in the expression of negation in the histories of Egyptian-Coptic and Arabic and explores the evidence for these respective developments being related by language contact. Both Coptic and Arabic have undergone a development known as Jespersen's Cycle (JC), whereby an original negative marker is joined by some new element to form a bipartite negative construction. The original marker then becomes optional while the new element becomes the primary negator. We present the results of a corpus study of negation in late Coptic, showing that, at the time when Arabic speakers began to settle in Egypt, the bipartite negative construction still predominated. This being the case, we argue that native speakers of Coptic learning Arabic as a second language played a key role in the genesis of the Arabic bipartite negative construction. More generally, we give reasons to doubt the a priori preference for internal explanations of syntactic change over those involving contact, as well as the assumption that the two are mutually exclusive. Rather, we suggest that not only purely internal but also (partially) contactinduced change can profitably be accounted for in terms of child language acquisition leading to a change in the grammars of individual speakers.

This paper introduces the ongoing ERC-funded project Chronologicon Hibernicum, which studies the diachronic developments of the Irish language between c. 550-950, and aims at refining the absolute chronology of these developments. It presents firstly the project organization, its subject matter and objective, then gives an overview of the potentials and challenges in studying the Early Irish language. The project combines historical linguistic analysis, corpus linguistic methods and Bayesian statistic tools. Finally the paper explains the impact of this project in preserving the Irish cultural heritage and the lessons learned in the first three years.

Thurneysen (1946: 510, GOI §835) discusses the prefix/preposition/preverb (eDIL s.v. eter, etir), which has the following variants : etar, eter, etir, itar, itir, and itar. For simplicity, I will refer to this element as . I will label the variants as either (-)e-variants (etar, eter, etir), or (-)i-variants (itar, itir, itar). Thurneysen is uncharacteristically imprecise in discussing the variation. His commentary on the variation in the initial syllable can be summarized in three points, listed in ( 1): 1. a. (-)e-variants are common in the Würzburg and Turin Glosses, although (-)i-variants are also found. b. Before infixed pronouns in Milan one finds both etar and itir. c. In 'later' Old Irish (the St. Gall and the Karlsruhe Augustine glosses), etar and itar are more common.This essentially amounts to a list of random features amongst which no similarities can be observed. In a forthcoming paper, Griffith (2016a) clarifies the distribution of some of these variants, concentrating largely on the phonological history of the second vowel. He also notes that (-)i-variants of are uncommon and that the variant is limited to pretonic position (i.e., preverbs in deuterotonic compound verbs, and non-conjugated prepositions). In the Würzburg Glosses, he notes 1 out of 32 pretonic examples. In the Milan Glosses, he notes 5 out of 64 pretonic examples. 2 In the St. Gall Priscian Glosses, he notes 10 out of 36 pretonic examples. He interprets the rarity of the (-)i-variant and the 1 I gratefully acknowledge the help I received on various points in this paper from David Stifter, Aaron Griffith, and Bernhard Bauer. 2 I have a slightly different count for the Würzburg and Milan Glosses (for full details see the Appendix). I count 33 pretonic examples in Würzburg, with 1 (-)i-variant. I count 69 pretonic examples in Milan with 4 examples having an (-)i-variant.