ON THE RELATIVE ORDER OF ADJECTIVES IN OLD IRISH
ON THE RELATIVE ORDER OF ADJECTIVES IN OLD IRISH

Summary/Abstract: This study examines the relative order of adjectives in Early Irish and seeks to determine thepreferred order of adjectives in the noun phrases in a corpus of Old and Middle Irish. To date, toolittle research exists on this topic in Early Irish: grammars of the language typically determine theoutline of adjective use, and some recent research investigates factors determining pre- or post-modification (Linnemeier, 2024). Yet so far little is known about the distribution of adjectives incorpus data and which factors influence distribution. In particular, the question which role is playedby date of composition or text category has not received enough attention.Thus, the current study uses a corpus-linguistic approach to determine the distribution ofadjectives in a tagged corpus of Old and Middle Irish, the POMIC corpus (Lash 2014). To do so,the corpus search interface CorpusSearch 2 (Randall 2009) is used to detect complex noun phraseswhich involve one or more adjectives. The study provides some evidence for diachronic variationin the use of adjectives in Old and Middle Irish corpus data, but larger databases are needed todetermine the relative influence of genre and time of composition. There are some indications,however, that previous mention of a concept and the use of parallel structures in other languagesmay influence prefixed or postnominal position of adjectives.

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