Frances Dowle’s Robins Prize winning article has been published in Transactions of the Philological Society.

In ‘Neutral Forms of Be as Default Forms: The Utility of Underspecification and Blocking in a Welsh Morphosyntactic Phenomenon’, Dowle explores how in Welsh, in certain tenses, unique forms of the verb for ‘be’ are used in positive clauses. These specialised forms of ‘be’ are incompatible with positive main-clause declarative complementizers, despite their apparent featural compatibility. For most speakers, they are also blocked from if-clauses; although, Dowle reports on data regarding their recent spread to this context. These forms contrast with negative and neutral forms of ‘be’. In this article, Dowle proposes that neutral forms are ‘elsewhere’ or default forms, which arise when positive forms are blocked. The account, which is illustrated in Lexical-Functional Grammar formalism, restricts the distribution of positive forms through functional specification and by treating them as portmanteaus of complementizers and verbs. The advantage of this approach is that it does not require mismatching between feature bundles such that, for example, a polar-interrogative verb form expresses declarative meaning in particular configurations. Rather, the approach utilises the familiar notions of underspecification and morphological blocking in order to obtain the correct distribution of forms. In so doing, the analysis sheds light on the utility of underspecification, the nature of blocking relationships and at the same time furthers our understanding of the Welsh data.

Frances was joint winner of the 2025 Robins Prize along with recent graduate Dr Chen Xie, who is now a lecturer at the School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai University.