Re: Probability of Article Replacement?

Nik Taylor wrote:
>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.
At an lecture in optimality theory (the mathematical kind) today, I come up
with possible solution somewhat similar to this, which involves a kind of
chain-shift; The old definite article eventually _ez(a)_ becomes so
widespread that speakers start using the demonstrative _ha_ "this" as a kind
of "emphatic" definite article, and eventually the development reaches the
point where _ez_ is essentially "morphemic sugar" (as someone, to
Christophe's annoyance, described French le/la/les), and _ha_ is required to
mark definiteness. Essentially, _ez_ would've turned into a indefinite
article and _ha_ to the definite one (wondrously confusing to speakers of
related languages that retains derivatives of _eza_ as definite articles),
with _ha_ as the new definite article. _Ha_ meaning "this" would be
differentiated by expansion to _ha dza_ "this one" and _ha dze:n_ "these
many", which'd then contract to _hazd_ and _hazden_, which later looks like
_hazd_ with the regular pl ending _-(e)n_. Is a development of this kind
plausible?

                                                      Andreas

_________________________________________________________________
MSN 8 helps eliminate e-mail viruses. Get 2 months FREE*.
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus

Reply