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Author Sommerer, Lotte, author

Title Article Emergence in Old English : a Constructionalist Perspective / Lotte Sommerer
Published Berlin ; Boston : De Gruyter Mouton, [2018]
©2018

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Description 1 online resource (374 pages)
Series Topics in English Linguistics ; Volume 99
Topics in English linguistics ; 99.
Contents Frontmatter -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- Tables -- Figures -- List of Abbreviations -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Nominal determination and the articles in Present Day English -- 3. Article emergence in Old English -- 4. Diachronic Construction Grammar -- 5. Nominal determination in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle -- 6. Nominal determination in Old English prose -- 7. Article emergence: a constructional scenario -- 8. Conclusion -- 9. Appendix: manuscript and corpus information -- References -- Index
Summary 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
Analysis Analogy
Articles
Constructionalization
Definiteness
Nominal Determination
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes In English
Online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 22. Mai 2018)
Subject English language -- Article.
English language -- Old English, ca. 450-1100 -- Article
LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General.
English language -- Article
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2018941018
ISBN 9783110541052
311054105X
9783110539417
3110539411