Article Emergence in Old English: A Constructionalist Perspective

378 Pages·2018·7.64 MB·English

by  Lotte Sommerer

Lotte Sommerer
Article Emergence in Old English
Topics in English Linguistics
Editors
Elizabeth Closs Traugott
Bernd Kortmann
Volume 99
Lotte Sommerer
Article Emergence
in Old English
A Constructionalist Perspective
ISBN 978-3-11-053937-0
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-054105-2
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-053941-7
ISSN 1434-3452
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018941018.
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© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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To Evelien and Niki, who made this possible

Acknowledgements
This book is a thoroughly rewritten and expanded version of my doctoral disser-
tation Old English se: from demonstrative to article. A usage-based study of nomi-
nal determination and category emergence, which I defended in 2011 at the Uni-
versity of Vienna. Leaving the world of academia behind for a while, the publication
of the current monograph has taken some time but I am quite happy about the
‘delay’ as this enabled me to extend the empirical scope (by also investigating the
indefinite article), reassess some of my arguments and reframe the storyline to
offer a more advanced constructionalist perspective. In any case, this book would
not exist in its current form was it not for a couple of people who I would like to
thank now. First of all, I would like to express my gratitude to Niki Ritt, my official
PhD supervisor, and Olga Fischer, my unofficial one. Both of them are experts on
diachronic change and various central ideas in this book developed when I was
reflecting on discussions with them. I also have to thank Evelien Keizer, who re-
cently gave me the chance to come back to do linguistics full time and whose
unparalleled expertise on the English noun phrase and syntactic models has
been extremely helpful. I thank especially those three scholars for their guidance
and their support when discussing the topic and linguistics in general. I also wish
to thank several departmental colleagues from my old and new research teams
for their comments and theoretical contributions, namely Andreas Baumann,
Theresa Illés, Gunther Kaltenböck, Kamil Kaźmierski, Herbert Schendl, Julia Skala
and Eva Zehentner. This book would simply not exist without Theresa’s enor-
mous help with Old English and Andreas’ statistical expertise and support. I also
need to thank many international colleagues whose feedback and comments
have effectively protected this book from being oversimplified, uninformed or in-
consistent. Additionally, I would like to thank my editor Elizabeth Closs Traugott
for a very close reading of the manuscript and her excellent advice and invaluable
comments. I am also grateful to George Walkden for reviewing the generative sec-
tions. Finally, I also thank Christina Prömer for her proofreading; she did an ex-
cellent job. Any remaining mistakes are my own.

Contents
Acknowledgements | vii
Tables | xiv
Figures | xvi
List of Abbreviations | xvii 
1  Introduction | 1 
1.1  The phenomenon | 7 
1.2  Data and methodology | 14 
1.3  The approach | 18 
1.4  Goals and limitations | 23 
1.5  Outline of the book | 24 
2  Nominal determination and the articles in Present Day English | 28 
2.1  Noun phrase structure | 30 
2.1.1  Headedness: nouns as prototypical NP heads | 31 
2.1.2  The determiner position in functional ‘slot’ models | 34 
2.1.3  Halliday’s ‘experiential structure’ and Langacker’s notion of
‘grounding’ and ‘type specification’ | 41 
2.1.4  Referentiality and specificity | 44 
2.2  Article usage in Modern English | 46 
2.2.1  The semantics of (in)definiteness | 46 
2.2.2  The definite article | 51 
2.2.3  The indefinite article | 54 
2.2.4  Occurrence restrictions with nouns | 56 
2.2.5  Frequency distribution | 59 
2.3  Demarcation criteria for articlehood | 61 
2.3.1  Criterion 1: No Independence | 62 
2.3.2  Criterion 2: No Predication | 63 
2.3.3  Criterion 3: No Co-occurrence | 63 
2.3.4  Criterion 4: Relative Position | 65 
2.3.5  Criterion 5: Obligatoriness | 66 
2.3.6  Criterion 6: Exclusiveness | 67 
2.3.7  Criterion 7: Syntactic Motivation Only | 68 
2.4  Concluding remarks: primary and secondary criteria | 68