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Re: Probability of Article Replacement?

From:Andreas Johansson <and_yo@...>
Date:Wednesday, February 26, 2003, 19:34
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

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Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...>