Definite articles

The concept of definiteness is by no means exclusively expressed by articles. As has been shown by Krámsky (1972), various other grammatical phenomena can contribute to mark definiteness, amongst which word order, case inflection, verb agreement and stress or intonation. Definiteness as a nominal feature has been considered as the analogue of the perfective aspect in the verbal domain: both convey the grammatical function of quantification (Leiss 2000, 2007). From a typological viewpoint, the grammatical category of the articles is rather uncommon. According to Dryer (1989), articles would be attested in only one third of the languages of the world. Only 8 % would have both a definite and an indefinite article. Moreover the spread of this phenomenon is geographically very unequal, with a high incidence in (Western-)European languages (for an overview, see Himmelmann 1997:195-207; Bauer 2007; Dryer 2008). From a historical viewpoint, it is established with respect to the European languages, for which written records enable us to observe long term evolutions, that, apart from Greek, the grammatical category of articles is a recent phenomenon. Hence, the existence of this category is not a feature inherited from Indo-European. On the contrary, a Semitic influence has been hypothesized for the Mediterranean area (Putzu and Ramat 2001). As to Romance, although the grammaticalization process is initiated in Late Latin (Selig 1992; Putzu and Ramat 2001), full-fledged definite articles appear only in the first vernacular texts, from the 9 Century on. In Germanic languages, they occur in Middle High German and Middle English around the 11 century. According to Heine and Kuteva (2006), the Romance and Germanic model is replicated and spreads from West to East, affecting also non-European languages like Finnish. They observe that the influence is more important in the southern part of Europe (Albanian, Macedonian, Bulgarian) than in the North (Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian). Schroeder (2006) shows that there is geographical continuum: in Western-European languages, the definite article is formally distinct from the demonstrative (e.g. English, Spanish, French); in Central Europe, the definite article has the same form as the demonstrative pronoun (e.g. German); some Eastern European languages have a demonstrative but no definite article (e.g. Russian) or only an incipient article use of the demonstrative, limited to certain registers or used by younger speakers (e.g. Finnish, cf. Laury 1997). Even though the grammatical category of articles as such is far from being universal, the grammaticalization process that leads to its development exhibits cross-linguistic regularities: in the majority of cases, the definite article originates from a weakened demonstrative, mostly the distal demonstrative or the 3 person demonstrative, whereas the indefinite article derives from the unity numeral ‘one’. Other sources are exceptional: