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Why Should a Demonstrative Turn Into a Preposition? The Evolution of Welsh Predicative yn

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

Orin D. Gensler
Orin D. Gensler*
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig
*
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Inselstraβe 22, 04103 Leipzig, Germany [gensler@eva.mpg.de]
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Abstract

This article is devoted to the anatomy of an unnatural syntactic change. It presents the life history of the Welsh predicative particle yn—its diachronic genesis in Indo-European, its synchronic status, and (much more centrally) what happened along the way, and why what happened happened specifically in Welsh. Synchronically, I give syntactic, semantic, typological, and textual arguments—some rather new—that both predicative yn and verb-periphrastic yn are adverbializers and count as grammatically polysemous subsenses of the preposition 'in'. Diachronically, I argue that the pan-Celtic adverbializing particles yn/ent/int/ind (thence ultimately Welsh predicative yn) all derive from an article-like demonstrative sindo-/sinto- (and not from a preposition endo/ento). Radical categorial changes must therefore have occurred. I trace these changes and motivate a multistage metanalysis (not involving grammaticalization) whereby the original quasi-article first became an adverbializer and then was attracted into the orbit of the preposition 'in'. Though each microstage in the process makes good structural sense vis-à-vis the evolving système of the language, the achieved macrochange is highly unnatural.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 78 , Issue 4 , December 2002, pp. 710 - 764
Copyright
Copyright © 2002 Linguistic Society of America

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