“Tidings of Cú Chulainn, it is those which are here related”: How cleft sentence and nominativus pendens express emphasis in the Táin Bó Cúailnge

Abstract

This thesis focuses on fronting syntactical structures of Old Irish (cleft sentence and nominativus pendens, as well as ambiguous examples) and analyses instances of these in the Táin Bó Cúailnge for three factors of emphasis (topic, focus, and contrast). The hypothesis that cleft correlates to focus and nominativus pendens correlates to topic is proven correct in this corpus. Contrastive emphasis is also found very often in fronted structures, especially in cleft sentences. Ambiguous examples of noun-initial and even preposition-initial sentences are analysed in detail; possible new explanations are suggested for these structures.