The Grammaticalization of Demonstratives: A Comparative Analysis

Abstract

An article, irrespective of its distribution across natural languages, dialects and varieties, is a member of the class of determiners which particularizes a noun according to language-specific principles of grammatical and semantic structuring. Definite articles in Indo- European languages – in those grammatical systems where they are present – are derived from ancient demonstratives through a grammaticalization process: given that demonstratives are deictic expressions (i.e. they depend on a frame of reference which is external to that of the speaker and of the interlocutor) with the role of selecting a referent or a set of referents, it is easy to understand what the role of “universal quantifier” of the, which is in English the prototypical – but questionable – example of definiteness, is due to. Demonstratives are frequently reanalyzed across languages as grammatical markers (very often as definite articles, but also as copulas, relative and third person pronouns, sentence connectives, focus markers, etc.). In this article I concentrate on the grammaticalization of the definite article in English, adopting a comparative-contrastive approach (including a wide range of Indo- European languages), given the complexity of the article.