Re: Probability of Article Replacement?

Stephen Mulraney wrote:
> There's more to it than that; "Describing Morphosyntax" at one point
> (p266) mentions how some languages mark "discourse referentiality",
> which is when a newly-introduced item in discourse is "destined to
> feature" in the narrative. He then goes on to reference Wright and Givon
> (1987), saying that they "have shown that the demonstrative _this_
> in spoken English is, among other things, an indicator of discourse
> referentiality.
Yeah, I realize that, and, in fact, it inspired me to create an article
with just that meaning for Tevets, a descendant of Uatakassi.  At any
rate, it does appear to be the creation of a new article which has a
similar meaning to the indefinite article.  The colloquial use of "that"
is also not quite the same as "the", altho I'm not sure what the exact
difference is.  Anyways, by a rather broad definition, English could be
said to have acquired two new articles, making a fourway distinction,
and it seems plausible to me that it could be resimplified at some
future point, perhaps losing one or more of the original articles.

So, returning to Andreas' language, maybe there might've been a time
when both the old and the new definite articles coexisted with somewhat
different meanings, before being simplified to just one article.

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