Inge Genee studied Dutch and General Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam,
where she subsequently worked as a research assistant. She studied and later
taught Celtic at the University of Utrecht. In 1996/7 she was a lecturer in Linguistics
in York, England. She now lives with her family in Canada.
Sentential complementation in a functional grammar of Irish offers a corpus-based
description of this aspect of Irish syntax in three periods: Old (700-900), Middle
(900-1200) and Early Modern Irish (1200-1600). The core of the study consists
of a classification of Complement Taking Predicates, and describes correlations
between formal and functional aspects of sentential complement constructions,
with special attention to the role played by sentential complementation in the
expression of modality. Nine different parameters of syntactic, semantic and
pragmatic nature are shown to interact in producing the formal variation found
in each period. An analysis of key historical developments discusses the different
factors which result in the proliferation of non-finite construction types at the
expense of finite ones.
This book is of interest to linguists working on typology, subordination, modality
and language change. It is of special interest to anyone interested in Irish historical
grammar and verbal semantics.
