The Diachrony of Definiteness in North Germanic

Skrzypek, Dominika; Piotrowska, Alicja; Jaworski, Rafał

doi:10.1163/9789004463684

Cited by 7 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…This is different from English, where further mentions of body part nouns still appear as possNPs. We observe that the variation is highest in Period II, when the definite article enters its final stage of grammaticalization (Skrzypek et al, 2021). It seems that the choice of the NP type is to begin with conditioned by the animacy of the anchor, but gradually, as the grammaticalization of the definite article progresses, this variation is limited and all indirect anaphors are by default expressed by the definite article, apart from kinship terms.It seems that this is the crucial turning point in the history of the marking and one that results in the modern system, where the inalienables are presented as defNPs in unmarked contexts.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 78%

Animacy, Anaphora and Language Change in Swedish

Skrzypek

2021

gema

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This paper considers the role of animacy in the overt marking of indirect anaphors, i.e., noun phrases (NP), which introduce new discourse referents, that are grounded in the preceding discourse by means of a grounding element, an anchor. The indirect anaphors are considered in a diachronic perspective with reference to the emergent definite article and the variation between the article and other marking elements, in particular possessive pronouns. The study is based on an annotated corpus of Swedish prosaic texts from 1200–1550, which is a period of time when the definite article undergoes the process of grammaticalization in this language. The material was sorted according to the different combinations of the animacy of the anchor and the anaphor.The indirect anaphors which are anchored by means of expressions referring to animate entities show more variation of expression than those expressions referring to inanimate entities at the onset of definite article grammaticalization, but as the grammaticalization progresses, all indirect anaphors are by default expressed by the definite article. This is connected with the ongoing grammaticalization of the definite article and its extended use in new contexts. Keywords animacy; indirect anaphora; language change; definite article; Swedish

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 78%

Animacy, Anaphora and Language Change in Swedish

Skrzypek

2021

gema

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“…All of the texts included in the corpus are thus free translations of original Latin texts, or they are based on earlier translations to German or other Scandinavian languages. The influence of the original language of the texts cannot be denied, but the same texts have previously been successfully used in diachronic research of the Swedish language (see, e.g., Håkansson, 2008;Skrzypek, 2012;Stroh-Wollin, 2016;Piotrowska & Skrzypek, 2021;Skrzypek et al, 2021).…”

Section: Corpus and Methodologymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For the annotation, computer software called DiaPoss was used. It is a programme that facilitates annotation of texts; it was developed and used for other projects concerned with corpus linguistics (see Piotrowska, 2021;Skrzypek et al, 2021). The annotation is manual, but the programme aids the user with features such as assigning keyboard shortcuts to selected tags, storing and sorting of the annotated words, and generation of simple statistics.…”

Section: Corpus and Methodologymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Secondly, the differences between the North Germanic languages with respect to alienability splits (see section 3) suggest that their rise belongs to the individual histories of these languages. In particular, the constructions which are used to express inalienability involve the definite article, which grammaticalizes by 1500s (Skrzypek, Piotrowska & Jaworski, 2021). The diachronic perspective in alienability studies is not very common (see, however, Skrzypek & Piotrowska, 2017;Schuster, 2019;Cristofaro, 2020) and we lack sufficient data to judge how these splits arise.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…The period chosen for the study coincides with major shifts in the grammar of the Swedish language, which have a bearing on the constructions in question. It is the period when, among others, the definite article is formed and the NP word order stabilizes with a preference for the preposing of determiners and modifiers (Delsing, 2014;Skrzypek et al, 2021).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Alienability Splits in Swedish from a Diachronic Perspective

Piotrowska

Skrzypek

2022

gema

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The paper discusses possessive expressions with body-part nouns in Swedish (1300-1550) with particular focus on the so-called alienability splits, i.e., separate patterns of marking possession for alienable and inalienable entities. The key problem to be addressed is to what extent such splits can be found in Swedish and the aim of the study is to establish when they arise and what motivates their formation. The inalienable possessive constructions with bodypart referents in Modern Swedish include the so-called implicit possession, where only the definite article is used and the inalienable prepositional construction of the type 'the head on him'. The analyzed material consists of Old Swedish prosaic texts written between 1300 and 1550. The corpus includes eight texts and amounts to ca. 250,000 words. The material is studied both quantitatively and qualitatively; collostructional analysis is used for the statistical overview of the data. The results of the collostructional analysis confirm that the implicit possessive construction first appears in Period II (1350-1450) and becomes grammaticalized in the late 1400s. The inalienable prepositional construction is not found in the material studied and thus must be of later origin. The results suggest further that the inalienable possessive constructions do not arise as a result of the speaker's wish to disambiguate the notion of inalienability but are a by-product of other diachronic processes, such as the grammaticalization of the definite article in the indirect anaphoric context.

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