Agents in early Welsh and early Irish

"This is a study of medieval Welsh and Irish. It makes contributions to Celtic syntax and to prepositional semantics more generally." "The author investigates the structure and use of passives and verbal noun constructions, and shows how the human agent is expressed within them. She examines a wide range of texts including narratives, law texts, and annals. The data-oriented analysis draws on methods and concepts from functional grammar and cognitive linguistics. The book goes beyond earlier contributions in Celtic syntax and semantics by comparing data from Welsh and Irish; by discussing the internal structure of verbal noun and passive/impersonal constructions and their contributions to their contexts; and by presenting and demonstrating the value of new analyses of both agency and its markers, and the marking of instrument, cause, and indirect agency." "Dr. Muller has written the book to be accessible to a wide range of scholars and students, including those in linguistics, historical and comparative philology, Celtic studies, and medieval language and literature."--BOOK JACKET.