The Myth of the Zero Article

158 Pages·2009·0.75 MB·English

by  Leszek Berezowski

The Myth of the Zero Article
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The Myth of the Zero Article
Leszek Berezowski
Continuum International Publishing Group
The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane
11 York Road Suite 704
London SE1 7NX New York NY 10038
www.continuumbooks.com
© Leszek Berezowski 2009
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or
any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the
publishers.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-4411-8513-6 (Hardback)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Publisher has applied for CIP data.
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn, Norfolk
To my wife Beata.
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Contents
Introduction 1
1 The origin of the concept 4
2 The application of the zero article 12
3 Previous accounts 24
4 Article grammaticalization 39
5 Singular role holders 54
6 Corpus data analysis 66
7 Conclusions and further research 132
Notes 137
Bibliography 138
Index 145
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Introduction
The zero article is the oddball of the English article system. For
one thing, it is a newcomer. Articles were fi rst recognized as a
separate part of speech more than two millennia ago by Greek
stoic thinkers (Krámský 1972: 13) and their use in English has
been commented on at least since the publication of William
Bullokar’s Bref Grammar for English in 1586, but the existence
of the zero article had not been posited until mid-twentieth
century. Secondly and even more curiously, it is hardly ever
inquired into.
The literature on the English articles is vast enough to fi ll a
library, but the books, papers and squibs published every year
deal almost exclusively with the defi nite and indefi nite article
given an overt phonological form, while the zero article inspires
hardly any published research at all. The overt articles are hotly
debated in a variety of theoretical frameworks that range from
pragmatics, e.g. Hawkins (1978), to formal semantics, e.g. Heim
(1982), cognitive studies, e.g. Epstein (2002) and to computer
linguistics, e.g. Poesio and Vieira (1998), to name only a few,
while the zero article is merely taken for granted. It is invoked
by the students of the English bare plural, e.g. the numerous
papers inspired by Carlson (1977), and relied on by descriptive
grammarians to explain away all the cases where the overt arti-
cles are not used in English, e.g. Quirk et al. (1985), Downing
and Locke (1994) or Biber et al. (1999), but its meaning is hardly
ever inquired into. The only works that consistently try to do so
are Hewson (1972) and Chesterman (1991).
This book will then explore the origin of this unusual con-
dition of the zero article in English, expose its roots and offer