{"id":1810,"date":"2023-07-08T18:01:22","date_gmt":"2023-07-08T22:01:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/?p=1810"},"modified":"2023-07-08T18:01:40","modified_gmt":"2023-07-08T22:01:40","slug":"defectivity-scottish-gaelic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/defectivity-scottish-gaelic\/","title":{"rendered":"Defectivity in Scottish Gaelic"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>[This is part of a series of\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/category\/language\/defectivity\/\">defectivity case studies<\/a>. Hat tip to John Hutchinson for this valuable information.]<\/p>\r\n<p>I am currently wrapping up a class at the <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.umass.edu\/lingstitute2023\/\">LSA Institute<\/a> class on defectivity, and as part of this class students presented case studies. Some of them students enriched case studies I have already presented in this defectivity blog series; the following new-to-me case was provided to us by John Hutchinson of the University of Surrey.<\/p>\r\n<p>Defective verbs in Gaelic have been long noted, particularly by Dwelly (1911) and Maclaren (1935). They are something of a grab-bag. First, there are verbs with tense restrictions:<\/p>\r\n<ul>\r\n<li>The verb of quotation\u00a0<em>ars<\/em>\/<em>orsa<\/em> &#8216;said&#8217; is restricted to past tense only.<\/li>\r\n<li>Where English has the adverb <em>almost<\/em>, Gaelic has <em>theab<\/em>, which selects a verb-noun complement (e.g., <em>theab e fh\u00e9in a bhith marbh<\/em> &#8216;he was almost dead&#8217;) and which is also restricted to past tense.<\/li>\r\n<li>The verb <em>faod<\/em> &#8216;may&#8217; is non-past only.<\/li>\r\n<li>The verb\u00a0<em>feum\u00a0<\/em>&#8216;must&#8217; is non-past only, though Hutchinson notes that past forms do occur in corpora.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<p>There are also a number of verbs which occur only in the imperative (cf. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/defectivity-english\/\">my judgments about English\u00a0<em>beware<\/em><\/a>):<\/p>\r\n<ul>\r\n<li><em>trothad\/trobhad<\/em> &#8216;come here&#8217;<\/li>\r\n<li><em>t(h)iugainn<\/em>\u00a0&#8216;come along&#8217;<\/li>\r\n<li><em>thalla<\/em> &#8216;go away&#8217;<\/li>\r\n<li><em>siuthad<\/em> &#8216;go on, fire away&#8217;<\/li>\r\n<li><em>feuch\u00a0<\/em>&#8216;behold&#8217; (though note this is not defective in the sense of &#8216;show&#8217;<em>)<\/em><\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<p>Finally, Hutchinson notes that prepositions are inflected for person and number but <em>eadar<\/em> &#8216;between&#8217; (naturally enough) only has plural forms. These cases of defectivity make a lot of semantic sense to me, particularly the restriction on the modal-like verbs and on &#8216;between&#8217;.<\/p>\r\n<h1>References<\/h1>\r\n<p>Dwelly, E. 1911. <i>Illustrated Gaelic English Dictionar<\/i><em><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">y<\/span>. <\/em>Alex Maclaren &amp; Sons. <br \/>Maclaren, J. 1935. <em>Maclaren&#8217;s Gaelic Self-Taught<\/em>, 4th edition. Alex Maclaren &amp; Sons.<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[This is part of a series of\u00a0defectivity case studies. Hat tip to John Hutchinson for this valuable information.] I am currently wrapping up a class at the LSA Institute class on defectivity, and as part of this class students presented case studies. Some of them students enriched case studies I have already presented in this &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/defectivity-scottish-gaelic\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Defectivity in Scottish Gaelic&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[28,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-defectivity","category-language"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1810"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1810\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1821,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1810\/revisions\/1821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}