Age Variation and Language Change in Welsh: Auxiliary Deletion and Possessive Constructions

Abstract

This chapter discusses age as a factor in morphosyntactic variation in contemporary Welsh, presenting analysis of corpus data. First, auxiliary verb deletion is discussed, where synchronic age variation is interpreted as showing language change, and internal evidence suggests that the construction shows convergence to a more English-like word order. Second, variation in the use of different types of Welsh possessive construction is discussed: an analysis of age variation in the use of different first plural and third singular possessives sees an increased use of an innovative construction—previously primarily associated with child speech—by younger adults, which is again used as an argument for language change, although this change looks to have developed differently across the first and third person forms. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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