The Diachrony of Definiteness in North Germanic Brill’s Studies in Historical Linguistics Series Editor Jóhanna Barðdal (Ghent University) Consulting Editor Spike Gildea (University of Oregon) Editorial Board Joan Bybee (University of New Mexico) – Lyle Campbell (University of Hawai’i Manoa) – Nicholas Evans (The Australian National University) Bjarke Frellesvig (University of Oxford) – Mirjam Fried (Czech Academy of Sciences) – Russel Gray (University of Auckland) – Tom Guldemann (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) – Alice Harris (University of Massachusetts) Brian D. Joseph (The Ohio State University) – Ritsuko Kikusawa (National Museum of Ethnology) – Silvia Luraghi (Università di Pavia) Joseph Salmons (University of Wisconsin) – Søren Wichmann (mpi/eva) volume 14 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/bshl The Diachrony of Definiteness in North Germanic By Dominika Skrzypek Alicja Piotrowska Rafał Jaworski leiden | boston This is an open access title distributed under the terms of the cc by-nc-nd 4.0 license, which permits any non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided no alterations are made and the original author(s) and source are credited. Further information and the complete license text can be found at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ The terms of the cc license apply only to the original material. The use of material from other sources (indicated by a reference) such as diagrams, illustrations, photos and text samples may require further permission from the respective copyright holder. The research presented in this monograph was financed by a research grant from the Polish National Science Centre (ncn) entitled Diachrony of definiteness in Scandinavian languages, number 2015/19/b/hs2/00143. The authors gratefully acknowledge this support. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov lc record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2021012844 Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill‑typeface. issn 2211-4904 isbn 978-90-04-43603-9 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-46368-4 (e-book) Copyright 2021 by D. Skrzypek, A. Piotrowska, and R. Jaworski. Published by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. 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Contents List of Tables and Figures ix Abbreviations xii 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Introductory Remarks 1 1.2 Definiteness in the Modern North Germanic 3 1.2.1 The Definite Article in Modern North Germanic Languages 4 1.2.1.1 Insular Languages 4 1.2.1.2 Continental Languages 7 1.2.2 The Indefinite Article in Modern North Germanic Languages 9 1.2.2.1 Insular Languages 9 1.2.2.2 Continental Languages 9 1.3 Aims, Scope and Organization of the Book 10 2 Reference in Discourse and Models of Article Grammaticalization 12 2.1 Introductory Remarks 12 2.2 The Rise of the Definite Article 13 2.2.1 Types of Reference/Definite Article Use 14 2.2.1.1 Direct Anaphora 15 2.2.1.2 Indirect Anaphora 16 2.2.1.3 Larger Situation Use 23 2.2.2 The Etymology of the Definite Article 25 2.2.3 Demonstratives vs. Articles 26 2.2.4 From a Demonstrative to a Definite Article 27 2.2.5 The Meaning of Definiteness 31 2.2.5.1 Definite Articles in Fering and German 31 2.2.5.2 The Problem of Indirect Anaphora 35 2.2.6 Grammaticalization of the Definite Article and Strong–Weak Definite Article Semantics 36 2.2.7 Final Stages of the Grammaticalization of the Definite Article 38 2.3 The Rise of the Indefinite Article 39 2.3.1 Types of Indefinite Article Use 39 2.3.2 From a Numeral ‘One’ to an Indefinite Article 40 2.4 Previous Studies on the Grammaticalization of the Definite Article in North Germanic 41 vi contents 2.4.1 General Studies 42 2.4.1.1 The Development of Double Definiteness in North Germanic 51 2.4.2 Definite Article in Old Norse and Icelandic: Johnsen (1975), Faarlund (2009), van Gelderen (2007) 54 2.4.3 Definite Article in Danish: Skafte Jensen (2007a) 57 2.4.4 Definite Article in Swedish: Larm (1936), Skrzypek (2012), Dahl (2004 and 2015), Stroh-Wollin (2016) 58 2.5 Previous Studies on the Grammaticalization of the Indefinite Article in North Germanic 64 2.5.1 Indefinite Article in Icelandic: Leijström (1934) 64 2.5.2 Indefinite Article in Danish: Skafte Jensen (2016) 64 2.5.3 Indefinite Article in Swedish: Brandtler and Delsing (2010), Skrzypek (2012), Stendahl (2013) 65 2.6 Summary 67 3 Sources, Methods and Tools 70 3.1 Periodization of the North Germanic Languages 70 3.2 The Corpus 73 3.2.1 Period I (1200–1350) 76 3.2.1.1 Swedish 76 3.2.1.2 Danish 77 3.2.1.3 Icelandic 78 3.2.2 Period II (1350–1450) 80 3.2.2.1 Swedish 80 3.2.2.2 Danish 80 3.2.2.3 Icelandic 82 3.2.3 Period III (1450–1550) 83 3.2.3.1 Swedish 83 3.2.3.2 Danish 83 3.2.3.3 Icelandic 84 3.3 The DiaDef Tool and Its Benefits for the Study 85 3.3.1 Tool Overview 85 3.3.2 Multi-Level Tagging 85 3.3.3 Automatically Generated Suggestions 89 3.3.4 Collected Data 90 3.3.5 Statistics Generator 90 3.3.6 Regression Analysis 92 3.4 Annotation Issues 93 3.5 Summary 96 contents vii 4 The Diachrony of (In)definiteness—A Quantitative Study 98 4.1 Introduction 98 4.2 General Data 98 4.3 Definiteness and Number 101 4.4 Definiteness and Gender 104 4.4.1 Results by Gender 106 4.5 Definiteness and Case 110 4.5.1 Case and the Definite Article 113 4.5.2 Case and the Indefinite Article 118 4.6 Definiteness, Subjecthood and Objecthood 120 4.6.1 Syntactic Functions and Definiteness 121 4.7 Definiteness and Animacy 128 4.8 Definiteness and Type of Reference 132 4.9 All Factors—A Refined Analysis 139 4.9.1 The Definite Article 140 4.9.2 The Indefinite Article 144 4.9.3 The Definite Article vs. Bare Nouns—Classification Tree Analysis 144 4.10 Summary 156 5 Grammaticalization Models Revisited—A Qualitative Analysis 158 5.1 Introductory Remarks 158 5.2 On Models of Grammaticalization 158 5.3 Grammaticalization of the Definite Article 160 5.3.1 From Deixis to Direct Anaphora 160 5.3.1.1 Accessibility Marking Scale 161 5.3.1.2 Direct Anaphors in the Corpus 163 5.3.1.3 Interim Summary 168 5.3.1.4 Anaphoric Marking in Anaphoric Chains 169 5.3.1.5 From Deixis to Direct Anaphora—A Brief Summary 172 5.3.2 From Direct Anaphora to Indirect Anaphora 172 5.3.2.1 Indirect Anaphors—Typology 176 5.3.2.2 Semantic Types: Meronymic Relations 179 5.3.2.3 Thematic Types 182 5.3.2.4 Inference-Based Conceptual Types 184 5.3.2.5 Summary 185 5.3.3 From Indirect Anaphora to Larger Situation Use 185 5.3.4 Summary—A Review of the Grammaticalization Chain of the Definite Article 190 viii contents 5.4 Grammaticalization of the Indefinite Article 193 5.4.1 The Presentative Marker 193 5.4.2 The Specificity Marker 197 5.4.3 The Non-specificity Marker 200 5.4.4 Summary 201 5.5 Grammaticalization of Definiteness—A Larger Chain 202 5.6 Excursus: The Incipient Indefinite Article in Icelandic beyond 1500 204 5.6.1 Cardinal Uses 211 5.6.2 Potential Cardinal Use 212 5.6.3 Temporal Adverbials and Presentative Marker 213 5.6.4 Marker of Specificity 214 5.6.5 Marker of Non-specificity 215 5.6.6 Other Types of Non-specific Contexts 217 5.6.7 Generic Reference 220 5.7 Summary 221 6 Discussion and Conclusions 223 6.1 Introduction 223 6.2 Grammaticalization of the Definite Article 223 6.3 Grammaticalization of the Indefinite Article 229 6.4 The Puzzles Revisited 231 6.5 Concluding Remarks 235 Sources 237 References 241 Index 257 Tables and Figures Tables 1 An overview of NPs in North Germanic 5 2 Icelandic case inflection in bare nouns and definite nouns 6 3 Faroese case inflection in bare nouns and definite nouns 6 4 Stages and contexts in the grammaticalization of the definite article (after Skrzypek 2012:49) 30 5 The definite article paradigms in Fering (Ebert 1971b:159) 32 6 The suggested global cycle of definite articles (Carlier and Simonenko 2016:10) 37 7 Stages and contexts in the grammaticalization of the indefinite article (after Skrzypek 2012:53) 42 8 The inflectional paradigm of (h)inn 46 9 Definite nouns in Old Swedish (adapted from Skrzypek 2012:67) 46 10 Proposed dating of the cliticization of hinn in North Germanic (adapted from Skrzypek 2012:74) 48 11 The inflectional paradigm of sá in Old Norse 50 12 Double definiteness development in Norwegian after Stroh-Wollin (2015:132) 53 13 Double definiteness development in Swedish after Stroh-Wollin (2015:133) 53 14 Periodization of the North Germanic languages before 1100 71 15 Periodization of Old West Nordic after 1100 71 16 Periodization of Old East Nordic after 1100 72 17 Periodization used in the present study 72 18 Length of the texts in the corpus (total word counts) 74 19 Number of NPs tagged in the corpus 74 20 The annotation tags defined for the present project 87 21 Overall numbers of annotated words in the DiaDef system 90 22 The definite nouns in the corpus—an overview 99 23 Indefinite nouns in the corpus—an overview 99 24 Singular and plural nouns in the corpus (total frequencies) 102 25 Singular and plural nouns with -IN 103 26 The inflectional paradigm of the demonstrative hinn ‘yon’ in the singular 105 27 The inflectional paradigm of the numeral enn ‘one’ 105 28 The proportions of all genders in the corpus 106 29 Definiteness and the masculine