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The Development of the Definite Article in Old High German and Old French: a Comparative Analysis

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The Development of the Definite Article in Old High German and Old French: a Comparative Analysis Corso di Laurea magistrale (ordinamento ex D.M. 270/2004) in Scienze del Linguaggio Tesi di Laurea The development of the definite article in Old High German and Old French: a comparative analysis. Relatore Prof.ssa Marina Buzzoni Correlatore Prof. Roland Hinterhölzl Laureando Daniela Rampazzo Matricola 815421 Anno Accademico 2011 / 2012 1. Introduction The aim of this dissertation is to investigate the development of the definite article in the Germanic and Romance languages; in particular I will limit my field of research to Old High German, for the first group, and Old French, for the second. Following the perspective of a comparative analysis, I will focus my attention on those steps which lead to the progressive evolution of this class of elements, with the intent of individuating similarities and possible divergences existing between the two aforementioned languages. It has already been successfully proofed that even among languages belonging to different families, some changes occur in a similar way (for example the choice of the source for the definite article), thus offering interesting material for a cross-linguistically oriented research1. Even if it may sound obvious, it is not convenient to think that the article suddenly appeared out of the blue; such a vision is very limitative and does not take into account the internal changes these languages underwent and the complex nature, which characterizes and motivates this phenomena. Consequently my intent is to find out where the article comes from and if the process that lead to its formation took place at a common level (i.e. Proto-Germanic for the Germanic languages or Latin for the Romance languages) or individually, in each language. Quoting Leiss (2000: 2): Das kausale ‚Warum„ ist die Frage nach dem Woher des Artikels. […] die beiden Fragerichtungen hängen eng zusammen: solange die Funktion des Artikels, d.h. seine präzisen Aufgabenstellungen nicht bekannt sind, solange wird man Schwierigkeiten haben herauszufinden, welche Faktoren sein Entstehen bewirkt haben könnten. 2 In my opinion this statement is very important, as it underlines on one of the crucial points of my discussion: the individualization and the detailed analysis of each passage which played a fundamental role in the development of the definite article is necessary, as each of them 1 The revisitation proposed by Keenan (2011), in relation to Greenberg‟s „cycle of definiteness‟ (1978) offers a proper example: in her work, she tries to apply a version of the cycle proposed by Greenberg (that was developed from some American and African languages, all sharing the same peculiarity of having an article system base on a single element), extending the generalization also to indefinite articles. Harris (1980) was actually one of the first who tried to adapt this model to both Germanic and Romance languages. 2 Leiss, E. (2000:2): „The causal „why‟ is the question about „where‟ the article comes from. [...] both directions of the question are strictly related to each other: so long as the function of the article, i.e. its precise types of problem are not known, so long we will have difficulties to find out which factors may have caused its genesis „ 2 improves the understanding of the kind of function the article had and what promoted the development till its actual usage. The topic I chose for my dissertation is of particular interest, as it is not very simple to find a proper and exhaustive explanation that can take into account of any single instance, present in a text: this is due to the fact that the genesis of a new grammatical category has many implications at different levels, in particular in the field of syntax and semantics. Furthermore the data I am analyzing are just based on the texts transmitted by manuscripts. Due to the intrinsic properties linked to the written language itself, this approach can, in a certain way, be limitative. For instance, if we consider how a native speaker uses his idiom, and if we compare the utterance to a composition redacted by the same person, we will notice that there is not a perfect correspondence: it is very common in speech to do some “errors”, which may not exist in a more meditated and controlled written text, thus also if the speaker has received a good instruction. Even if there are many intervening disturbing factors, it is possible to recognize systematic changes, enough to outline the grammaticalization path the article underwent. The turning point of the debate about the development of the definite article in the area of the Germanic languages started in the eighties with Kovari (1984) and Oubouzar (1989). Kovari tries to give an explanation about the origin of the article in Gothic. Summarizing his analysis in few words, the motivation which lead to the development of the article, was strictly connected to the weak declension of the adjective, as the latter progressively underwent a change of its grammatical functions; in particular, its capability to assign definiteness was subject to weakening.3 Kovari‟s hypothesis is interesting in the way he considers the relationship existing between the definite article and the weak declension of the adjective, as this is also attested in other Germanic languages; anyway I am convinced that this is just one of the aspects we have to take into consideration.4 3 According to Braune & Eggers (1987) we can postulate an early stage in which the adjective, if weak declined, could alone be a marker of definiteness. Wilmanns (1909) states that this capability also determined a relative independence of the adjective. As the weak declension started to lose this capability, Kovari (1984: 55) proposes that the article was added as reinforcement. His observations regarding the Gothic language can be also theoretically applied to the other Germanic languages, as Old High German, for instance had also a strong and a weak declension system for adjectives, the latter always associated with a definite interpretation. 4 As my intent is to proceed among the lines of a cross-linguistically oriented analysis, Kovari‟s proposal cannot be applied to Romance languages. We will see later that Old French, for instance, had just one declension system. 3 Oubouzar (1989) offers one of the most detailed analyses about the development of the article in Old High German. In particular she remarks that indefinite articles did not just appear as counterparts of the definite ones5. In the branch dedicated to the development of the article in Romance, it is necessary to mention the works of Epstein (1994, 2001), Selig (1992) and Trager (1932). In particular, Epstein and Trager noticed that in the texts produced during the Late Latin period, the distal demonstrative ille became progressively a way to convey a particular nuance of significance, communicating personal involvement and expressivity. As Epstein restrains himself only on ille, Selig‟s studies (1992) are more complete, as she also considers the role played by ipse as competitor form to be grammaticalized into a definite article. In the first part of my dissertation I will provide some basic definitions, for a better understanding of how I intend to precede with my analysis. I retain it is necessary to mention such as an important concept as definiteness is; I will also briefly explain what a functional category is; last but not least, we cannot simply give as known that a process of grammaticalization implies. The second part will be dedicated to the analysis of the manuscripts, hence we will see in detail in which direction changes, like semantic bleaching and conditions of use, affected the demonstrative pronouns and the order of the elements, which are part of a nominal expression. A brief paragraph will be dedicated to the reconstructed determiner system of the Indo- European; I will then proceed providing and commenting examples not only from Old French and Old High German, but also from the Classical and Late Latin period, in order to see in which direction grammaticalization moved. After having examined the data and once I have individuated the key elements to discuss, I will focus my attention on the most theoretical part of this analysis, i.e. the comparison of some hypothesis, trying to individuate the pros and cons of the different approaches and deducing my conclusions. 5 As also remarked by Presslich (1998) in her study on indefinite articles, their origins is related to the [+ partitive] feature with mass nouns and with count nouns with indefinite plural. The indefinite reading was due to the association of the numeral with count nouns. 4 Part I 1.1. Definition of functional category A language is made up of many elements, which can be mainly split in two groups, i.e. lexical or functional categories. Noun, adjectives and verbs (all, with the exception of auxiliaries) are items of the first group. Quoting Szczepaniak (2011:1) they are Inhaltswörter, […] also all das, was wir aus der uns umgebenden Welt kennen, bezeichnen (denotieren) können. 6 Because of their concreteness they can appear in isolation and new members can be added to this class. Items of a functional category present, instead, the opposite characteristics: […] als Bündel abstrakter Merkmale existieren, die keine einheitliche Repräsentation im Lexikon haben.7 Case is for instance an interesting example. One of the UG principles is that each language assigns case to their nominal expressions, in order to make their thematic roles visible.8 On the contrary, the way in which case can be rendered, i.e. if morphologically visible or not, is a language-specific parameter. If we compare Old English and Modern English, the difference is very evident: Nominative (Old English) se cyning (Modern English) the king Dative (Old English) þæm cyninge (Modern English) for/to the king In Old English we can notice that both the demonstrative pronoun and the noun are declined, whereas in Modern English the two forms are morphologically the same.
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