The definite article in Indo-European: Emergence of a new grammatical category?

Bauer, Brigitte L. M.

doi:10.1075/slcs.89.07bau

Cited by 50 publications

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“…Second, as summarised in section 3, according to scholars like Abraham (1997; 2007a; 2007b) and Leiss (2000; 2007), in Gothic and Old High German perfective verbs selecting the accusative case entail a definite reading of the object, whereas they imply an indefinite reading when taking the genitive case. Bauer (2007) discusses Abraham’s and Leiss’s results, concluding that the issue of the relationship between case, aspect and definiteness in Proto‐Indo‐European deserves more research. However, with regard to Ancient Greek, she quotes two examples of the genitive case as encoding ‘the partitive indefinite direct object’ (Bauer 2007: 134); I quote one of them:…”

Section: The Partitive Genitive In Ancient Greek and Its Proto‐indmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…Bauer (2007) discusses Abraham’s and Leiss’s results, concluding that the issue of the relationship between case, aspect and definiteness in Proto‐Indo‐European deserves more research. However, with regard to Ancient Greek, she quotes two examples of the genitive case as encoding ‘the partitive indefinite direct object’ (Bauer 2007: 134); I quote one of them:…”

Section: The Partitive Genitive In Ancient Greek and Its Proto‐indmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…This demonstrates why it would be inaccurate to regard the partitive genitive as necessarily implying an indefinite reading of the object argument in Ancient Greek (as implicitly argued by Bauer 2007; see above). In interpreting the occurrences of genitive‐marked nouns with consumption verbs, one must distinguish between the substance consumed, which may be referential or non‐referential, definite or indefinite, and the quantity taken from it, which is always indefinite, in the sense that it is not specified.…”

Section: Analysis Of the Ancient Greek Datamentioning

confidence: 98%

“…There are also traces of the accusative/genitive alternation in early Latin (cf. Bennett 1966: 35; Serbat 1996; Bauer 2007: 133–5), where they are limited to technical, non‐literary texts, as in the following example from Cato, who is giving culinary instructions:…”

Section: The Partitive Genitive In Ancient Greek and Its Proto‐indmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…What is remarkable is the fact that Bauer (2007) regards the object argument as ‘indefinite’ even though it is accompanied by a definite article (and it is clearly referential). Evidently enough, she extends Abraham’s and Leiss’s interpretation of Germanic languages to Greek.…”

Section: The Partitive Genitive In Ancient Greek and Its Proto‐indmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The case for the partitive case: the contribution of Ancient Greek

Napoli

2010

Transactions of the Philological Society

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As is well known, Indo‐European languages like Vedic, Gothic and Ancient Greek allow the use of the genitive case with a partitive value. This use is traditionally explained by invoking the notion of partial affectedness of the object argument. In the present paper, a case study from Ancient Greek is analysed: accusative/genitive alternation with consumption verbs. It appears that the partitive genitive has the functional property of denoting an indefinite and non‐specified quantity. I will try to show that in both Homeric and Classical Greek the accusative/partitive genitive alternation does not depend on the definite/indefinite or referential/non‐referential status of the object argument, but on the more general parameter of verbal boundedness. Under the theoretical framework provided by recent typological and semantic studies, the hypothesis is investigated according to which the partitive genitive always gives rise to an unbounded reading of the verbal action, as opposed to the accusative, which can be ambiguous between a bounded and an unbounded reading.

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Section: The Partitive Genitive In Ancient Greek and Its Proto‐indmentioning

confidence: 95%

Section: The Partitive Genitive In Ancient Greek and Its Proto‐indmentioning

confidence: 95%

Section: Analysis Of the Ancient Greek Datamentioning

confidence: 98%

Section: The Partitive Genitive In Ancient Greek and Its Proto‐indmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Partitive Genitive In Ancient Greek and Its Proto‐indmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The case for the partitive case: the contribution of Ancient Greek

Napoli

2010

Transactions of the Philological Society

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Grammaticalization in Progress in Old French: Indefinite Articles

Carlier

2012

Research on Old French: The State of the Art

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Cross-linguistically, indefinite articles tend to emerge later than definite articles. The grammaticalization process that will lead to the indefinite articles un and du/ des of Modern French is still in a very early stage in Old French. Uns is indeed still close to its source meaning, the numeral value, both in its quantitative dimension of uniqueness marker ('only one') and in its qualitative dimension of identity marker ('one and the same'). It has nevertheless acquired a textual role in Old French, which attests its shift towards the status of article: on the one hand, in line with the quantitative numeral meaning, it delimits an entity and introduces it as a new prominent discourse referent; on the other hand, according to its qualitative numeral meaning, it introduces a new type or a new category. As to the partitive, it is claimed that it has not reached the status of article in Old French, but has an intermediate status, between preposition and determiner. This hypothesis offers an account for the low frequency of the partitive, for its hybrid syntactic properties and for its specific meaning of indefinite extraction from a concrete and contextually definite partition set. From a methodological viewpoint, this study illustrates that a synchronic analysis gains by being combined with a diachronic perspective: a more comprehensive account of the exact meaning and the specific conditions of uses of uns and of the partitive in Old French can be offered if the analysis is based upon a correct definition of the source expression, evaluates its evolutionary stage with respect to this source and fits into an overall picture of the grammaticalization path towards the status to full-fledged article.

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Determiners

Siemund¹

2013

Varieties of English

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The definite article in Indo-European: Emergence of a new grammatical category?

Cited by 50 publications

References 0 publications

The case for the partitive case: the contribution of Ancient Greek

The case for the partitive case: the contribution of Ancient Greek

Grammaticalization in Progress in Old French: Indefinite Articles

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