Background: The categorial status of the verbal noun in Scottish Gaelic, and Celtic languages more broadly, has been a subject of longstanding debate. Traditional analyses often force it into a discrete classification as either a verb or a noun, failing to capture the full spectrum of its syntactic behaviour. This study challenges such binary approaches by adopting a framework of grammatical gradience [1, 66], which posits that linguistic categories are often fuzzy and continuous rather than discrete. The primary aim is to systematically map the distributional properties of Scottish Gaelic verbal nouns onto a verb-noun continuum.
Methods: A qualitative distributional analysis was conducted, drawing examples from authoritative grammars [69, 111], existing linguistic literature, and corpora. A set of syntactic and morphological criteria was established to serve as metrics for "verb-ness" (e.g., object case assignment, adverbial modification) and "noun-ness" (e.g., determiner selection, adjectival modification). Various constructions featuring the verbal noun were systematically evaluated against these criteria.
Results: The analysis reveals a clear functional continuum. At one pole, constructions involving determiners and adjectival modifiers show the verbal noun behaving as a prototypical noun. At the opposite pole, in progressive and perfective aspect constructions, it exhibits prototypical verbal properties. Critically, the study identifies several intermediate constructions that display a hybrid mix of verbal and nominal syntax. This is most evident in perfective 'possessive' constructions and purposive clauses, where the verbal noun simultaneously exhibits features traditionally associated with both lexical categories, challenging any attempt at discrete classification.
Conclusion: The findings suggest conclusively that the Scottish Gaelic verbal noun is not a discrete category but a gradient one, whose position on the continuum is determined by its specific syntactic environment. This study contributes a more nuanced model for Gaelic syntax and provides strong empirical support for theories that treat grammatical categories as non-discrete, emergent properties of language use [29, 74].
