THE DIACHRONY OF WELSH SUBJECT PRONOUNS
THE DIACHRONY OF WELSH SUBJECT PRONOUNS

Summary/Abstract: In many languages, independent pronouns become reduced to inflectional affixes which areultimately lost, resulting in the creation of new independent pronouns. The loss of null subjectstherefore often goes hand in hand with a loss of agreement morphology on the verb. Inflectionalmorphology has remained virtually unchanged from the Middle Welsh period up to the present day,but whereas null subjects were frequently found in the earliest period, in Present-day spoken Welshovert pronouns are generally preferred. In this article we present a pilot study of the history ofsubject pronouns in Welsh based on six annotated texts from the Parsed Historical Corpus of theWelsh Language (PARSHCWL) from three different time periods (fourteenth, sixteenth andeighteenth centuries), as well as in translated and non-translated texts. We show that null subjectsare favoured in all periods and use a mixed-effects logistic regression model to test which factorshave an effect on whether the subject pronoun is overt or null and if this distribution changes overtime.

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