This paper shows that, rather than being necessary for argumenthood or referentiality, determiners in Old French were optional, but used in relation to discourse properties such as focus/emphasis on the one hand, and in relation to phonological/metric requirements on the other. The choice between the use of a bare noun and the use of a noun with a determiner was not free, but created a one-to-one mapping between form and function. This one-to-one mapping between form and function disappeared once the insertion of determiners became obligatory. It is shown that the compulsory insertion of determiners in modern French is connected to an alternation in the morphology of nominals and that it is driven by the operation Cyclic Agree.
2018. The trajectory of φ-features on Old French D and n. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 63:2 ► pp. 167 ff.
Espinal, M.Teresa & Sonia Cyrino
2022. The Status ofDein Romance Indefinites, Partitives and Pseudopartitives*. Studia Linguistica 76:1 ► pp. 167 ff.
Klassen, Gabrielle & John W. Schwieter
2013. The Morphosyntactic Interface of Determiner Phrases. Open Journal of Modern Linguistics 03:04 ► pp. 360 ff.
Pescarini, Diego
2021. Microvariation in Verbal and Nominal Agreement: An Analysis of Two Lombard Alpine Dialects. Probus 33:2 ► pp. 227 ff.
Pescarini, Diego
2021. Microvariation in Verbal and Nominal Agreement: An Analysis of Two Lombard Alpine Dialects. Probus 33:2 ► pp. 227 ff.
Rupp, Laura & Sali A. Tagliamonte
2019. “They used to follow Ø river”: The Zero Article in York English. Journal of English Linguistics 47:4 ► pp. 279 ff.
SCHØSLER, LENE & HARALD VÖLKER
2014. Intralinguistic and extralinguistic variation factors in Old French negation withne-Ø, ne-mie, ne-pasandne-pointacross different text types. Journal of French Language Studies 24:1 ► pp. 127 ff.
Simonenko, Alexandra & Anne Carlier
2020. Between demonstrative and definite: A grammar competition model of the evolution of French l-determiners. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 65:3 ► pp. 393 ff.
Simonenko, Alexandra, Benoît Crabbé & Sophie Prévost
2022. Unexpected Partitive Articles in Francoprovençal*. Studia Linguistica 76:1 ► pp. 101 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 10 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
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