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.
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.
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.
2015. Bare Nominals in Brazilian Portuguese: more on the DP/NP analysis. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 33:2 ► pp. 471 ff.
Cyrino, Sonia & M.Teresa Espinal
2020. On the Syntax of Number in Romance. Studia Linguistica 74:1 ► pp. 165 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.
Klassen, Gabrielle & John W. Schwieter
2013. The Morphosyntactic Interface of Determiner Phrases. Open Journal of Modern Linguistics 03:04 ► pp. 360 ff.
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