The syntax of the sentence in old Irish

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Old Irish, the language of Ireland from the 8th to the 10th century AD, is the oldest Celtic language sufficiently documented for grammatical analysis. This work offers a comprehensive linguistic examination of Old Irish sentence structure. While the basic simple sentence follows a straightforward verb-subject-object order, certain sentence types reveal more complex syntactic patterns, which are significant for typological, diachronic, and comparative-historical studies of Old Irish, as well as Celtic and Indo-European languages. The analysis focuses on sentence types that include obligatory cataphoric pronouns referencing later elements, constructions with marked initial topics, and the cleft sentence's focusing construction. The study employs a functional and typological approach, utilizing a text corpus from the glosses on the Pauline epistles at Würzburg, supplemented by Old Irish legal texts. The emphasis lies on the communicative intent and content of the sentences analyzed. This edition is a newly edited version of MacCoisdealbha's Bochum dissertation from 1974, which remained unpublished due to the author's death in 1976, and includes editorial notes reflecting advancements in the field since its initial completion.