7. Resultados
7.4. Correlación grupal de las Morfo Estructuras Espermáticas y la Dispersión de la
This section deals with Irish sentence structure, in order to be able to view the colour terms in the right context. It is not only useful to look into the distribution and properties of adjectives in Irish, as all Irish colour terms are adjectives, but also into the manner in which they operate within a clause. As a general rule, the Irish adjective is placed behind the noun or other adjective it modifies (Ó Dochartaigh 1984: 293), for example: don chapell dhubh ‘to the black horse’ (Ó Siadhail 1989: 116). There are however more restrictions that apply, such as adjectival and noun declension, agree- ment, and word order in adjective clusters.
First, we will look at the basic constituent order. All Celtic languages have basic VSO order (Ó Dochartaigh 1984: 293). This is an anomaly within the Indo-European language family, as no other IE language has this basic word order, and even worldwide it is a minority word order (Fife 2010: 19).
Definite article
+ numeral + noun + adj + demonstrative Possessive pronoun
Figure 6 shows the pattern of a NP in Irish. Either a definite article2 or a possessive pronoun is
selected, followed by a numeral, followed by the head noun, followed by the adjective, which is in turn followed by a demonstrative. An example can be seen in figure 7 below:
Leis na trí coin móra gránna fíor-dhubha sin.
With the.pl three dogs big ugly very-black those
‘with those three big ugly very black dogs’
Figure 7: word order in adjectival clusters (Ó Dochartaigh 1984: 292)
Figure 7 also shows that when multiple adjectives occur in a cluster, there is a fixed order: an adjec- tive of size comes first, followed by one designating quality, followed by adjectives of colour. The noun is the only obligatory element in the nominal phrase. There are some exceptions to this basic order. In some cases, adjectival modifiers can precede the noun, for example, and adverbial modifiers can sometimes precede any of the adjectives (Ó Dochartaigh 1984: 293), but this is not relevant for this classification.
Both attributive and predicative adjectives agree in gender, number, and case with their head noun (Ó Baoill: 178). In Modern Irish, the predicative adjective sometimes remains unin- flected, leading to the following structure: go rabhadar na súile dall aige ‘so that his eyes were blind’ (Lewis and Pederson 1937: 180-181). Figure 9 shows the declension paradigm of two attributive adjectives modifying a masculine noun and a feminine noun.
The black flag (M) The white shirt (F)
sg pl sg pl
nom
an bratach dubh na bratacha dubha an léine gheal na léinte gealagen
an bhrataigh dhuibh na mbratach dubh na léine gile na léinte gealaprep
an bhratach dhubh na bratacha dubha an léine ghil na léinte gealaFigure 8: Nominal and adjectival declension paradigm (Ó Dochartaigh 1984: 295)
Something to be aware of is lenition of the adjective, which is the phonological mutation of initial consonants, that can take place under certain conditions, for example in compounding, which will be discussed in section 3.4, or in the AP or NP: na fóid dhubha ‘the black sods’ and beithígh bhána ‘white cattle’ (Ó Siadhail 1989: 119-20). In these sentences, the adjectives dubh ‘black’ and bán ‘white’ are subjected to consonant mutation, indicated by the h following the initial consonant (the –a suffix is an indicator of agreement). This mutation is purely functional and does not semantically affect the interpretation of lexical items.
2.5 summary
In summary, Chapter 2 provides an overview of the evolution of the Irish language, by outlining the different stages the language has gone through, evaluating the language contact situation, and concluding with the current sociolinguistics and grammatical structure of Irish. In terms of language contact, Latin turned out to have contributed to the Irish colour vocabulary by donating purpura to the Welsh language, which was subsequently donated to Irish. It developed into OI corcur > MI corcair > MO corcra. The influence of Old Norse is quite difficult to get grip on: the language contact seems to have been extensive, yet all early Viking settlers fully gaelicised (this must have left a mark on the language, but this is beyond the scope of this thesis to reconstruct). This
suggests that contact influence would have been bidirectional, some authors propose a Hiberno- Norse pidgin to this extent. In terms of lexical influence, borrowings from Old Norse are mainly nautical in nature. I will explore a possible Norse borrowing of a construction involving colour in Chapter 4 (see section 4.4.1). The steady decline of the Irish language as the popular vernacular can be ascribed to a constant flux of events which changed the socio-economic circumstances of the country which facilitated the gradual adoption of the English language in favour of Irish. Attempts to revive the language during the 20th century were not unsuccessful, national censuses have shown
that there is an increase in Irish speakers due to the Irish-medium Gaelscoileanna. The last section of this chapter gave some insight into the grammatical structure of Irish: its VSO status, NP structure, ordering of adjectival clusters and nominal and adjectival declensions. In the following chapter I will present my classification of the Irish colour spectrum, with comprehensive descriptions of the features that mark this system.
In this chapter, I will relay my findings on the specificities of the Irish colour classification. I will discuss the BCTs and their etymologies; which colour term should in my opinion be included or excluded as BCTs; the role that brightness, hue, saturation and tone plays; the grue category; variegation; and I will conclude with the morphology of colour terms, including compounding and verbal derivatives of colour adjectives.