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Re: Probability of Article Replacement?

From:Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...>
Date:Wednesday, February 26, 2003, 11:47
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. -- "There's no such thing as 'cool'. Everyone's just a big dork or nerd, you just have to find people who are dorky the same way you are." - overheard ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-Name: NikTaylor42

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John Cowan <cowan@...>