Definiteness in Gothic & Old Church Slavonic biblical translation: a semantic analysis of form and use

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My research focus is to compare the distribution and semantics of various potential instantiations of definiteness in Gothic and Old Church Slavonic (OCS), using comparative analysis to investigate the extent to which Gothic and OCS are able to represent the definiteness of the original Greek sources, and comparing the range of situational uses (types of semantic reference) of such instantiations of definiteness in each language. The aim is to determine not only the extent to which Gothic and OCS can each exhibit definiteness as independent languages, but, more innovatively, the extent to which the semantics of definiteness in Gothic and OCS are comparable. By comparing the situational uses of definite forms, I aim to go further than the literature and position each language on a spectrum of semantic development towards full definiteness, with Greek as an exemplar of full definiteness marking.Both Gothic and Old Church Slavonic have been argued to express definiteness as a semantic category to varying degrees. I aim to build on the existing literature by noting some clear similarities between each language in terms of potential instantiations of definiteness. There is a clear point of comparison between Gothic and OCS in the use of distinctive adjectival forms which have been argued to render definiteness: OCS long-form adjectives used in contrast to short-form adjectives (Lindberg, 2013 and Flier, 1974), and Gothic weak adjectives in contrast to strong adjectives, with such weak forms in the Gothic also (mostly) accompanied by demonstrative pronouns (Ratkus, 2018). We also note the use of distinct demonstrative pronouns in each language which will develop in later attestations of Slavonic and Germanic languages into fully-fledged definite articles: OCS demonstrative pronouns develop into definite articles in Middle Bulgarian, while the demonstrative pronouns in Gothic contrast with fully-fledged definite articles in modern Germanic varieties. I will also investigate some areas of divergence, for example that OCS arguably makes use of the genitive-accusative (GA) as a potential marker of definiteness in the development of the animacy category in Slavonic. I intend to take these formal similarities further by considering the semantics of such forms, both regarding definiteness as a category of each language, and as a spectrum of comparison between the two. To this end, I will make use of a comprehensive list of different situational uses of definiteness (semantic reference types) cross-linguistically which I can then use as the basis of the analysis. By analysing the instantiations of definiteness in each language with such a spectrum, I hope to offer insight not only into the distribution of such instantiations of definiteness in each language, but also the semantic development of such forms, in turn helping us to put Gothic and OCS on a spectrum towards the full definiteness marking we see in the modern varieties.My initial research will involve quantifying the various potential instantiations of definiteness in each of the three languages (including Greek) and classifying these along a spectrum of situational uses. To this end, I plan to use the same dataset of Greek, Gothic and OCS biblical translations that I used for my MPhil thesis on the semantics of 'ga'-prefixation in Gothic compared to OCS and Greek. As we do not have the original Greek source of the Gothic or OCS biblical translations, I shall also make use of a range of Greek sources, including critical editions such as that of Streitberg. We also note that semantic tagging of reference types in the Greek New Testament has been performed previously (Lindberg, 2013), with similar work on OCS performed within the TOROT treebank. This makes the task significantly more feasible, as my work will primarily involve analysing the Gothic text, cross-referencing the previous analysis of OCS and Greek text, and adapting this analysis to my specific spectrum.