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Article Emergence in Old English

A Constructionalist Perspective
  • Lotte Sommerer
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2018
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This book investigates nominal determination in Old English and the emergence of the definite and the indefinite article. Analyzing Old English prose texts, it discusses the nature of linguistic categorization and argues that a usage-based, cognitive, constructionalist approach best explains when, how and why the article category developed. It is shown that the development of the OE demonstrative 'se' (that) and the OE numeral 'an' (one) should not be told as a story of two individual, grammaticalizing morphemes, but must be reconceptualized in constructional terms. The emergence of the morphological category ‘article’ follows from constructional changes in the linguistic networks of OE speakers and especially from ‘grammatical constructionalization’ (i.e. the emergence of a new, schematic, mostly procedural form-meaning pairing which previously did not exist in the constructicon). Next to other functional-cognitive reasons, the book especially highlights analogy and frequency effects as driving forces of linguistic change.

Author / Editor information

Lotte Sommerer, University of Vienna, Austria.


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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
May 22, 2018
eBook ISBN:
9783110541052
Hardcover published on:
May 22, 2018
Hardcover ISBN:
9783110539370
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Front matter:
17
Main content:
357
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