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The Definiteness Cycle in Germanic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 February 2008

Elly van Gelderen
Elly van Gelderen
Affiliation:
Arizona State University
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Abstract

In this paper, I provide examples from Germanic of cyclical changes involving the nominal phrase. Using a DP structure, it can be observed that demonstratives in specifier positions of the DP are reanalyzed through time as articles in head positions. The change from demonstrative to article is known as the definiteness cycle and described in Greenberg 1978 and Lyons 1999. Providing examples from Old Norse, Old English, and Afrikaans, I suggest an explanation for the cycle in terms of a cognitive principle, Feature Economy, that assists in language acquisition and hence language change.Many thanks to Werner Abraham, Johanna Wood, Jan Terje Faarlund, two anonymous referees, and especially to Terje Lohndal for helpful discussion and comments.

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ARTICLES
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Journal of Germanic Linguistics , Volume 19 , Issue 4 , December 2007 , pp. 275 - 308
Copyright
© 2007 Society for Germanic Linguistics

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References

Primary Sources

Bately Janet (ed.). 1980. The Old English Orosius. Oxford: Oxford University Press [EETS S.S. 6].
British National Corpus (BNC). Available at http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk (21 December 2007).
Hecht Hans (ed.). 1965. Übersetzung der Dialoge Gregors des Grossen. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
Helsinki Corpus (HC). Available through the Oxford Text Archive and the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus at http://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/ (21 December 2007).
Holt Robert (ed.). 1878. The Ormulum. Two volumes. Oxford: Clarendon.
Klaeber Fr. (ed.) 1922[1941]. Beowulf. Boston: Heath & Co.
Nichols J.G. (ed.) 1963. The Diary of Edward VI. New York.
Poetic Edda. Available at http://www.heimskringla.no/original/edda/index.php (21 December 2007).
Skeat Walter (ed.) 1881–7. The Gospel according to St. Matthew, St. Mark, St. Luke, and St. John. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Reprint: Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.]
Sweet Henry (ed.) 1934[1871]. King Alfred's West-Saxon version of Gregory's Pastoral Care. London: Oxford University Press.
Abney Steven. 1987. The English noun phrase in its sentential aspect. Cambridge, MA: MIT doctoral dissertation.
Abraham Werner. 1997. The interdependence of case, aspect, and referentiality in the history of German: The case of the genitive. Parameters of morphosyntactic change, ed. by Ans van Kemenade & Nigel Vincent, 29–61. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Abraham Werner. 2007. Discourse binding: DP and pronouns in German, Dutch, and English. Nominal determination: Typology, context constraints, and historical emergence, ed. by Werner Abraham, Elisabeth Leiss, & Elisabeth Stark, 21–47. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Cheshire Jenny, Viv Edwards, & Pamela Whittle. 1993. Non-standard English and dialect levelling. Real English: The grammar of English dialects in the British Isles, ed. by James Milroy & Lesley Milroy, 53–96. London: Longman.
Chomsky Noam. 1986. Barriers. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky Noam. 1995. The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky Noam. 2002. On nature and language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chomsky Noam. 2004. Beyond explanatory adequacy. Unpublished manuscript, MIT.
Chomsky Noam. 2005. Three factors in language design. Linguistic Inquiry 36. 1–22.
Chomsky Noam. 2006. Approaching UG from below. Unpublished manuscript, MIT.
Dahl Osten. 2004. Definite articles in Scandinavian. Dialectology meets typology, ed. by Bernd Kortmann, 147–180. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Delsing Lars Olof. 1993. The internal structure of noun phrases in the Scandinavian languages. Lund: University of Lund Dissertation.
Demske Ulrike. 2001. Merkmale und Relationen. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Diesing Molly. 1991. Indefinites. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Diessel Holger. 1999. Demonstratives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Donaldson Bruce C. 1993. A grammar of Afrikaans. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Faarlund Jan Terje. 2004. The syntax of Old Norse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Faarlund Jan Terje. To appear. A mentalist interpretation of grammaticalization theory. Grammatical change and linguistic theory: The Rosendal papers, ed. by Tolli Eyþórrson. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Faarlund Jan Terje. 2007. From clitic to affix: The Norwegian definite article. Unpublished manuscript, University of Oslo.
Frawley William. 1991. Linguistic semantics. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Gelderen Elly van. 2004. Grammaticalization as economy. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Giusti Giuliana. 2001. The functional structure of noun phrases. Functional structure in DP and IP, vol. 1, ed. by Guglielmo Cinque, 54–90. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gordon Eric Valentine. 1956. Introduction to Old Norse. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Greenberg Joseph. 1960[1954]. A quantitative approach to the morphological typology of language. International Journal of American Linguistics 26. 178–194.Google Scholar
Greenberg Joseph. 1978. How does a language acquire gender markers. Universals of human language, vol. 3, ed. by Joseph Greenberg, 47–82. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Hawkins John A. 1994. A performance theory of order and constituency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heine Bernd & Tania Kuteva. 2002. World lexicon of grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Himmelmann Nikolaus. 1997. Deiktikon, Artikel, Nominalphrase. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Johannessen Janne Bondi. 2006. Just any pronoun anywhere? Pronouns and “new” demonstratives in Norwegian. A Festschrift for Kjell Johan Sæbø—in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the celebration of his 50th birthday, ed. by Torgrim Solstad, Atle Grønn, & Dag Haug, 91–106. Oslo: Unipub forlag.
Josefsson Gunløg. 2000. The PP-CP parallelism hypothesis and language acquisition. The acquisition of scrambling and cliticization, ed. by Susan M. Powers & Cornelia Hamann, 397–422. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Julien Marit. 2005. Nominal phrases from a Scandinavian perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Laury Ritva. 1997. Demonstratives in interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Lehmann Christian. 2002. Thoughts on grammaticalization. 2nd edn. München: LINCOM Europa.
Leiss Elisabeth. 1994. Die Entstehung des Artikels im Deutschen. Sprachwissenschaft 19.307–319.
Leiss Elisabeth. 2000. Artikel und Aspekt. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Lightfoot David. 1999. The development of language. Oxford: Blackwell.
Lohndal Terje. 2007. On the structure and development of nominal phrases in Norwegian. Nominal determination, ed. by Werner Abraham, Elisabeth Leiss, & Elisabeth Stark, 287–310. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Lyons Christopher. 1999. Definiteness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Philippi Julia. 1997. The rise of the article in Germanic languages. Parameters of morphosyntactic change, ed. by Ans van Kemenande & Nigel Vincent, 62–93. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Putnam Michael. To appear. Those there demonstratives. Leuvense Bijdragen.
Radford Andrew. 2000. Children in search of perfection: Towards a minimalist model of acquisition. (Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 34.) Colchester: University of Essex
Roehrs Dorian. 2006. The morpho-syntax of the Germanic noun phrase. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University doctoral dissertation.
Royen Gerlach. 1929. Die nominalen Klassifikations-Systeme in den Sprachen der Erde. Wien: Anthropos.
Rupp Laura & Hanne Page-Verhoeff. 2005. Pragmatic and historical aspects of definite article reduction in northern English dialects. English World-Wide 26. 325–346.Google Scholar
Taraldsen Tarald. 1990. D-projections and N-projections in Norwegian. Grammar in progress, ed. by Juan Mascaro & Marina Nespor, 217–49. Dordrecht: Foris.
Tauli Valter. 1958. The structural tendencies of languages. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia.
Traugott Elizabeth. 1992. Syntax. The Cambridge history of the English language, vol. 1. The beginning to 1066, ed. by Richard Hogg, 168–289. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wiese Heike. 2006. Kanak Deutsch. Presentation. University of Potsdam, Germany.
Wood Johanna. 2003. Definiteness and number: Determiner phrase and number phrase in the history of English. Tempe, AZ: Arizona State University doctoral dissertation.
Wood Johanna. 2007. Demonstratives and possessives: From Old English to present-day English. Nominal determination, ed. by Werner Abraham, Elisabeth Leiss, & Elisabeth Stark, 337–359. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Primary Sources

Bately Janet (ed.). 1980. The Old English Orosius. Oxford: Oxford University Press [EETS S.S. 6].
British National Corpus (BNC). Available at http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk (21 December 2007).
Hecht Hans (ed.). 1965. Übersetzung der Dialoge Gregors des Grossen. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
Helsinki Corpus (HC). Available through the Oxford Text Archive and the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus at http://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/ (21 December 2007).
Holt Robert (ed.). 1878. The Ormulum. Two volumes. Oxford: Clarendon.
Klaeber Fr. (ed.) 1922[1941]. Beowulf. Boston: Heath & Co.
Nichols J.G. (ed.) 1963. The Diary of Edward VI. New York.
Poetic Edda. Available at http://www.heimskringla.no/original/edda/index.php (21 December 2007).
Skeat Walter (ed.) 1881–7. The Gospel according to St. Matthew, St. Mark, St. Luke, and St. John. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Reprint: Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.]
Sweet Henry (ed.) 1934[1871]. King Alfred's West-Saxon version of Gregory's Pastoral Care. London: Oxford University Press.

Secondary Sources

Abney Steven. 1987. The English noun phrase in its sentential aspect. Cambridge, MA: MIT doctoral dissertation.
Abraham Werner. 1997. The interdependence of case, aspect, and referentiality in the history of German: The case of the genitive. Parameters of morphosyntactic change, ed. by Ans van Kemenade & Nigel Vincent, 29–61. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Abraham Werner. 2007. Discourse binding: DP and pronouns in German, Dutch, and English. Nominal determination: Typology, context constraints, and historical emergence, ed. by Werner Abraham, Elisabeth Leiss, & Elisabeth Stark, 21–47. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Cheshire Jenny, Viv Edwards, & Pamela Whittle. 1993. Non-standard English and dialect levelling. Real English: The grammar of English dialects in the British Isles, ed. by James Milroy & Lesley Milroy, 53–96. London: Longman.
Chomsky Noam. 1986. Barriers. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky Noam. 1995. The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky Noam. 2002. On nature and language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chomsky Noam. 2004. Beyond explanatory adequacy. Unpublished manuscript, MIT.
Chomsky Noam. 2005. Three factors in language design. Linguistic Inquiry 36. 1–22.
Chomsky Noam. 2006. Approaching UG from below. Unpublished manuscript, MIT.
Dahl Osten. 2004. Definite articles in Scandinavian. Dialectology meets typology, ed. by Bernd Kortmann, 147–180. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Delsing Lars Olof. 1993. The internal structure of noun phrases in the Scandinavian languages. Lund: University of Lund Dissertation.
Demske Ulrike. 2001. Merkmale und Relationen. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Diesing Molly. 1991. Indefinites. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Diessel Holger. 1999. Demonstratives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Donaldson Bruce C. 1993. A grammar of Afrikaans. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Faarlund Jan Terje. 2004. The syntax of Old Norse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Faarlund Jan Terje. To appear. A mentalist interpretation of grammaticalization theory. Grammatical change and linguistic theory: The Rosendal papers, ed. by Tolli Eyþórrson. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Faarlund Jan Terje. 2007. From clitic to affix: The Norwegian definite article. Unpublished manuscript, University of Oslo.
Frawley William. 1991. Linguistic semantics. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Gelderen Elly van. 2004. Grammaticalization as economy. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Giusti Giuliana. 2001. The functional structure of noun phrases. Functional structure in DP and IP, vol. 1, ed. by Guglielmo Cinque, 54–90. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gordon Eric Valentine. 1956. Introduction to Old Norse. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Greenberg Joseph. 1960[1954]. A quantitative approach to the morphological typology of language. International Journal of American Linguistics 26. 178–194.Google Scholar
Greenberg Joseph. 1978. How does a language acquire gender markers. Universals of human language, vol. 3, ed. by Joseph Greenberg, 47–82. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Hawkins John A. 1994. A performance theory of order and constituency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heine Bernd & Tania Kuteva. 2002. World lexicon of grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Himmelmann Nikolaus. 1997. Deiktikon, Artikel, Nominalphrase. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Johannessen Janne Bondi. 2006. Just any pronoun anywhere? Pronouns and “new” demonstratives in Norwegian. A Festschrift for Kjell Johan Sæbø—in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the celebration of his 50th birthday, ed. by Torgrim Solstad, Atle Grønn, & Dag Haug, 91–106. Oslo: Unipub forlag.
Josefsson Gunløg. 2000. The PP-CP parallelism hypothesis and language acquisition. The acquisition of scrambling and cliticization, ed. by Susan M. Powers & Cornelia Hamann, 397–422. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Julien Marit. 2005. Nominal phrases from a Scandinavian perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Laury Ritva. 1997. Demonstratives in interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Lehmann Christian. 2002. Thoughts on grammaticalization. 2nd edn. München: LINCOM Europa.
Leiss Elisabeth. 1994. Die Entstehung des Artikels im Deutschen. Sprachwissenschaft 19.307–319.
Leiss Elisabeth. 2000. Artikel und Aspekt. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Lightfoot David. 1999. The development of language. Oxford: Blackwell.
Lohndal Terje. 2007. On the structure and development of nominal phrases in Norwegian. Nominal determination, ed. by Werner Abraham, Elisabeth Leiss, & Elisabeth Stark, 287–310. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Lyons Christopher. 1999. Definiteness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Philippi Julia. 1997. The rise of the article in Germanic languages. Parameters of morphosyntactic change, ed. by Ans van Kemenande & Nigel Vincent, 62–93. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Putnam Michael. To appear. Those there demonstratives. Leuvense Bijdragen.
Radford Andrew. 2000. Children in search of perfection: Towards a minimalist model of acquisition. (Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 34.) Colchester: University of Essex
Roehrs Dorian. 2006. The morpho-syntax of the Germanic noun phrase. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University doctoral dissertation.
Royen Gerlach. 1929. Die nominalen Klassifikations-Systeme in den Sprachen der Erde. Wien: Anthropos.
Rupp Laura & Hanne Page-Verhoeff. 2005. Pragmatic and historical aspects of definite article reduction in northern English dialects. English World-Wide 26. 325–346.Google Scholar
Taraldsen Tarald. 1990. D-projections and N-projections in Norwegian. Grammar in progress, ed. by Juan Mascaro & Marina Nespor, 217–49. Dordrecht: Foris.
Tauli Valter. 1958. The structural tendencies of languages. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia.
Traugott Elizabeth. 1992. Syntax. The Cambridge history of the English language, vol. 1. The beginning to 1066, ed. by Richard Hogg, 168–289. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wiese Heike. 2006. Kanak Deutsch. Presentation. University of Potsdam, Germany.
Wood Johanna. 2003. Definiteness and number: Determiner phrase and number phrase in the history of English. Tempe, AZ: Arizona State University doctoral dissertation.
Wood Johanna. 2007. Demonstratives and possessives: From Old English to present-day English. Nominal determination, ed. by Werner Abraham, Elisabeth Leiss, & Elisabeth Stark, 337–359. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.