<p>The present study deals with the use of two Irish verb constructions, the autonomous (e.g. <i>cuireadh litreacha chun bealaigh</i>, ‘letters were dispatched’)<i> </i>and the passive progressive (e.g. <i>bhí m’athair á leigheas acu</i>, ‘my father was being cured by them’), in a corpus of 20th-century texts. From this corpus, 2,956 instances of the autonomous and 467 instances of the passive progressive were extracted and included in the analysis. Dialectal variation concerning the use of these two constructions is also surveyed.</p><p>The study explores and compares the use of the autonomous and the passive progressive. The main aim of the study is to investigate the two constructions with regard to their textual functions. The features studied relate to verb and clause type, as well as the measuring of topicality of patients, implicit agents, and – in the passive progressive only – overt agents. </p><p>The autonomous tends to be used when the patient is topical, or central, in the text. The passive progressive, on the other hand, is mainly used with an overt agent that is considerably more topical than the patient. In agent-less passive progressives, patients and implicit agents are equally low in topicality. The autonomous occurs about equally often in main and subclauses, while the passive progressive is used primarily in subclauses, mainly non-finite ones. This difference is connected to the finding that 24% of the clauses containing the autonomous denote events as part of a sequentially ordered chain of events, compared to 4% of those containing the passive progressive.</p><p>The most salient dialectal variation concerns the frequency of the passive progressive: 73% of the instances of the passive progressive in the database occur in the Munster texts, compared to 22% in Connacht 5% in Ulster. The autonomous, in contrast, is fairly evenly distributed across the dialects.</p>

The present study deals with the use of two Irish verb constructions, the autonomous (e.g. cuireadh litreacha chun bealaigh, ‘letters were dispatched’) and the passive progressive (e.g. bhí m’athair á leigheas acu, ‘my father was being cured by them’), in a corpus of 20th-century texts. From this corpus, 2,956 instances of the autonomous and 467 instances of the passive progressive were extracted and included in the analysis. Dialectal variation concerning the use of these two constructions is also surveyed. The study explores and compares the use of the autonomous and the passive progressive. The main aim of the study is to investigate the two constructions with regard to their textual functions. The features studied relate to verb and clause type, as well as the measuring of topicality of patients, implicit agents, and – in the passive progressive only – overt agents. The autonomous tends to be used when the patient is topical, or central, in the text. The passive progressive, on the other hand, is mainly used with an overt agent that is considerably more topical than the patient. In agent-less passive progressives, patients and implicit agents are equally low in topicality. The autonomous occurs about equally often in main and subclauses, while the passive progressive is used primarily in subclauses, mainly non-finite ones. This difference is connected to the finding that 24% of the clauses containing the autonomous denote events as part of a sequentially ordered chain of events, compared to 4% of those containing the passive progressive. The most salient dialectal variation concerns the frequency of the passive progressive: 73% of the instances of the passive progressive in the database occur in the Munster texts, compared to 22% in Connacht 5% in Ulster. The autonomous, in contrast, is fairly evenly distributed across the dialects.

This dissertation contains a critical edition of the early Irish tale Aided Derbforgaill “the violent death of Derbforgaill”. It includes an introduction discussing the main thematic components of the tale as well as intertextuality, transmission and manuscript relationship. The edition is accompanied by transcripts from the three manuscript copies of the tale and textual notes. Aided Derbforgaill is an Ulster Cycle tale and belongs to a category of tales describing the death of prominent heroes, rarely heroines, in early Irish literature. Arriving in the shape of a bird to mate with the greatest of all heroes, Cú Chulainn, Derbforgaill is refused by Cú Chulainn on account of him having sucked her blood. Forced to enter a urination competition between women, and upon winning this, Derbforgaill is mutilated by the other competitors. The tale ends with two poems lamenting the death of Derbforgaill. This very short tale is complex, not only in its subject matter, but in the elliptical language of the poetry. Thematically the tale is a combination of very common motifs found elsewhere in early Irish literature, such as the Otherworld, metamorphosis and the love of someone unseen, and some rare motifs that are almost unique to this tale, such as blood sucking and the urination competition. The text also have clear sexual overtones.