Title: Functions and distribution of determiners in Old English genitive noun phrases
Source document: Brno studies in English. 2022, vol. 48, iss. 1, pp. 25-50
Extent
25-50
-
ISSN0524-6881 (print)1805-0867 (online)
Persistent identifier (DOI): https://doi.org/10.5817/BSE2022-1-2
Stable URL (handle): https://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/digilib.76856
Type: Article
Language
License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International
Notice: These citations are automatically created and might not follow citation rules properly.
Abstract(s)
This paper aims to investigate the distribution and function of the determiners sē, sēo, þæt in Old English genitive noun phrases. The hypotheses presented stem from the analysis of the Old English version of Bede's "Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum". Data shows, on the one hand, that determiners display a peculiar distribution, as their position varies according to the relative order of the genitive modifier and the head noun in genitive noun phrases, be it "genitive+noun" or "noun+genitive". On the other hand, their function does not seem to be as clear-cut as is usually described in grammar textbooks, since determiners appear to be used in a bridging context, oscillating between pragmatic or semantic definiteness. The discussion in this paper provides a functional description of determiners on the basis of the type of genitive noun phrase as a contribution to the debate on the status of determiners in Old English. Additionally, it provides a hypothesis concerning the apparent correlation between determiners and "head + modifier" structures where they appear to be six times as frequent as in "modifier + head": the hypothesis is that this correlation is not casual, but may have originated from appositive structures of the kind "Head-Noun+[DET+Adj/N]".
References
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[2] Allen, Cynthia (2006) Possessives and Determiners in Old English. In: Nevalainen, Terttu, Klemola, Juhani and Laitinen, Mikko (eds.) Types of Variation: Diachronic, dialectal and typological interfaces. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 149–170. | DOI 10.1017/s136067430800275x
[3] Bosworth, J. and Toller, T. N. (ed.) (1898) An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary: Based on the Manuscript Collections of the Late Joseph Bosworth. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
[4] De Mulder, Walter and Carlier, Anne (2011) The grammaticalization of definite articles. In: Narrog Heine and Heine, Bernd (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 522–534. | DOI 10.1163/22105832-00402004
[5] Gil, David (2013) Genitive, Adjectives and Relative Clauses. In: Dryer, Matthew S. and Haspelmath, Martin (eds.) The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Munich: Max Plank Digital Library, Chapter 60. Available online at http://wals.info/chapter/60. (Accessed on 22/06/2022).
[6] Giofré, Valeria (2019) L'evoluzione del genitivo e di espressioni concorrenti da antico a medio inglese [Unpublished PhD diss.]. Università degli Studi di Bergamo, Bergamo, Italy.
[7] Gneuss, Helmut and Lapidge, Michael (2014) Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts (Vol. 15, Toronto Anglo-Saxon series). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
[8] Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. (2001) Articles. In: Haspelmath, Martin (ed.) Language Typology and Language Universals. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 831–841.
[9] Lambrecht, Knud (1994) Information Structure and Sentence Form. Topic, Focus and the Mental Representations of Discourse Referents (Cambridge studies in linguistics 71). Cambridge: Cambridge University press.
[10] Miller, Thomas (1997) The Old English Version of Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Early English text society Original series 95, 96, 110, 111). London: Published for The Early English Text Society by the Oxford University Press.
[11] Mitchell, Bruce (1985) Old English Syntax. Oxford: Clarendon.
[12] Ramat, Paolo (1986) Introduzione alla linguistica germanica. Bologna: Il Mulino.
[13] Ramat, Paolo (1987) The birth of new morphological categories: the case of the article and relative pronoun in Germanic languages. In: Linguistic Typology (Originally published 1987 ed., Vol. 1). Berlin, New York: De Gruyter Mouton, 113–134.
[14] Rhee, Seongha (2004) Semantic structure of English prepositions: An analysis from a grammaticalization perspective. Language Research 40 (2), 397–427.
[15] Silverstein, Michael (1976) Hierarchies of Features and Ergativity. In: Dixon, Robert M. W. (ed.) Grammatical Categories in Australian Languages. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 112–171.
[16] Trovesi, Andrea (2004) La genesi di articoli determinativi. Modalità di espressione della definitezza in ceco, serbo-lusaziano e sloveno. Milano: Franco Angeli.