The defi nite article in Modern Nordic languages is a suffi x, etymologically related to a demonstrative. The form is not attested in the oldest linguistic sources, the runic inscriptions, but appears fi rst in Icelandic sagas and Swedish and Danish legal codices from 13th century onwards. In these texts it does not appear with the same regularity as in modern languages. Despite numerous attempts to reconstruct the formation of the defi nite article in the Nordic languages, a number of questions remain either controversial or unanswered. The contention issues are the exact etymology of the article and the date of its formation. The demonstrative from which the article grammaticalizes appears in Old Icelandic in two forms: inn or hinn, in Old Swedish as hinn only. However, only inn appears as a clitic. It is argued here that the etymology of inn and hinn may provide an argument in favour of an early formation of the article.

Tables and FiguresTables 1 An overview of NPs in North Germanic 5 2 Icelandic case inflection in bare nouns and definite nouns 6 3 Faroese case inflection in bare nouns and definite nouns 6 4 Stages and contexts in the grammaticalization of the definite article (after Skrzypek 2012:49) 30 5 The definite article paradigms in Fering (Ebert 1971b:159) 32 6 The suggested global cycle of definite articles (Carlier and Simonenko 2016:10) 37 7 Stages and contexts in the grammaticalization of the indefinite article (after Skrzypek 2012:53) 42 8The inflectional paradigm of (h)inn 46 9Definite nouns in

The aim of the present study is to follow the development of the suffixed definite article in North Germanic, in particular taking into account the unique reference expressed by the nascent article. The study is based on the corpora of Old Swedish, Old Danish and Old Icelandic texts written between 1200 and 1550. Both qualitative and quantitative methods, such as logistic regression models, are applied. The study is grounded in the notions of familiarity and uniqueness, which we explore diachronically. The results indicate that the use of the definite article is much more frequent in familiar than in unique contexts in North Germanic in the periods studied, as a greater proportion of NPs with direct anaphors is definite in the oldest extant texts, as well as throughout the later periods, than the proportion of NPs with unique referents. NPs with unique referents are further shown to constitute a non-uniform group, where the 'more local' unique NPs (grounded in specific knowledge) appear more frequently with a definite article than the 'more global' unique referents (grounded in encyclopaedic knowledge).

ABSTRACT. The present paper studies the earliest stages of the grammaticalization of indefinite article in Old Swedish. The study is based on a corpus of Old Swedish texts and uses the model of grammaticalization as proposed by Heine 1997. The article en, etymologically related to the numeral 'one', is first used to mark new and salient discourse-referents and its primary function is cataphoric. However, en only fulfills this function when ocurring in a sentenceinitial subject NP. In the course of the grammaticalization, neither the sentence-initial position nor the subject function of the NP are required to present new and salient discourse referents.

The paper studies the use of the passive voice in academic texts written in Mainland Scandinavian languages (Danish, Norwegian and Swedish) by their native speakers and by adult Polish learners of those languages. The corpus consists of 37 MA theses written in Scandinavia and in Poland. A number of referring verbs were chosen for the purpose of the analysis. The results show that while there are discrepancies in the use of the passive voice in texts written by Polish and Scandinavian students, they cannot be unequivocally diagnosed as resulting from the grammatical and stylistic influence of the mother tongue.