Familiar vs. unique in a diachronic perspective. Case study of the rise of the definite article in North Germanic
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 22130833 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Alicja Piotrowska (0000-0002-9868-2964, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań), Dominika Skrzypek (0000-0002-9277-4622, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 6 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Publication date | 2021-07-08 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Glossa a journal of general linguistics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2397-1835 • E-ISSN: 2397-1835 |
| Publisher | Open Library of the Humanities (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.5334/gjgl.1178 |
| OpenAlex | W3180737583 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 6 |
The aim of the present study is to follow the development of the suffixed definite article in North Germanic, in particular taking into account the unique reference expressed by the nascent article. The study is based on the corpora of Old Swedish, Old Danish and Old Icelandic texts written between 1200 and 1550. Both qualitative and quantitative methods, such as logistic regression models, are applied. The study is grounded in the notions of familiarity and uniqueness, which we explore diachronically. The results indicate that the use of the definite article is much more frequent in familiar than in unique contexts in North Germanic in the periods studied, as a greater proportion of NPs with direct anaphors is definite in the oldest extant texts, as well as throughout the later periods, than the proportion of NPs with unique referents. NPs with unique referents are further shown to constitute a non-uniform group, where the ‘more local’ unique NPs (grounded in specific knowledge) appear more frequently with a definite article than the ‘more global’ unique referents (grounded in encyclopaedic knowledge)
Danish · Extant taxon · German · Germanic languages · Grounded theory · Icelandic · Linguistics · Qualitative research · Sociology · Anthropology · History · Lexicography and Language Studies · Linguistics and language evolution · Mathematics · Natural Language Processing Techniques · Philosophy · Psychology
| Citations per year | 0.25 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2022 - 2022 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |