Investigating the emergence of the definite article in Old English: About categorization, gradualness and constructions
Investigating the emergence of the definite article in Old English: About categorization, gradualness and constructions
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探究古英语中定冠词的出现：关于分类、渐进性和结构
DOI：
10.1515/flih.2012.007
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发表时间：
2012
影响因子：
10.6
通讯作者：
Lotte Sommerer
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Lotte Sommerer
本文试图对古英语中是否存在定冠词这一问题作出新的解释。首先，它试图确定冠词的实际含义，讨论了文献中提出的几个判断冠词的标准，并证明了只有其中一些标准对古英语中的类别识别是有用的。其次，本文提出了文章的主要特征和次要特征的区别，并将主要特征用于对约克-多伦多-赫尔辛基古英语散文句法分析语料库(YCOE)中各种散文文本中OE形式se的出现情况进行的语料库研究。这项研究的结果强调了在构式语法模型中重新定义冠词出现的概念，并考虑到渐变和渐变等概念的必要性。本文认为，英语定冠词的出现反映了定冠词在定冠词前置词中的先验地位。由于词汇不够明确，这样一个在语法上建立起来的位置有可能招募默认的填充者，而在OE确定的NP的情况下，那个填充者恰好是Se。将提供证据表明，古英语中确实已经出现了一个确定时段。这是大多数定语NP结构的一个特点，并引发了指示词se的逐渐语法化。
The article attempts to shed new light on the question if a definite article existed in Old English. First, it tries to determine what it actually means to be an article, discusses several criteria of ‘articlehood’ that have been proposed in the literature, and demonstrates that only some of them are useful for identifying the category in Old English. Next, a distinction between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ characteristics of articles is proposed, and the primary ones are employed in a corpus study of occurrences of the OE form se in various prose texts from the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (YCOE). The results of that study highlight the necessity to reconceptualize the emergence of the article within a construction-grammar model, and to take notions like gradience and gradualness into account. It will be argued that the emergence of the definite article in English reflects the prior establishment of a determination slot in the prehead of the NP. Being lexically underspecified, such a grammatically established slot has the potential of recruiting default fillers, and in the case of OE definite NPs that filler happened to be se. Evidence will be provided to show that a determination slot had indeed already emerged in Old English. It was a characteristic feature of most definite NP constructions and triggered the gradual grammaticalization of the demonstrative se.