Age variation and language change in Welsh: Auxiliary deletion and possessive constructions

This chapter discusses age as a factor in morphosyntactic variation in contemporary Welsh, presenting analysis of corpus data. First, auxiliary verb deletion is discussed, where synchronic age variation is interpreted as showing language change, and internal evidence suggests that the construction shows convergence to a more English-like word order. Second, variation in the use of different types of Welsh possessive construction is discussed: an analysis of age variation in the use of different 1st plural and 3rd singular possessives sees an incresed use of an innovative construction – previously primarily associated with child speech – by younger adults, which is again used as an argument for language change, although this change looks to have developed differently across the 1st and 3rd person forms.