ABSTRACT
Welsh, like all the modern Celtic languages, is a verb-subject-object language - that is, in a normal sentence the verb comes in first main position, with its subject following. But there are circumstances where a sentence's first main element can be something other than a verb. Here we are dealing with focused sentences, where special attention or focus is put on some particular element or item of information; When we wish to highlight something in this way in Welsh, we put it at the beginning of the sentence, because this makes the item very noticeable, since it is in the one position in the sentence where we would not expect anything but a verb. In this way, Welsh achieves by word order what English, for the most part, achieves by intonation. Look at these two pairs:
Daeth Ron ddoe Ron ddaeth ddoe
Ron came yesterday Ron came yesterday (not Bert)
The first is a neutral sentence conveying all-new information. It answers a very broad question like 'What happened?' The second is a focused sentence, focusing on Ron as the new information; it answers the question 'Who came yesterday?'; we know that someone did (that much is evident from the phrasing of the question), so the only new information in the answer is Ron. That new information is highlighted by placing it first. Notice also, by the way, that since Ron is still the grammatical subject, the verb daeth takes SM because it immediately follows.
