Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1981, Page 87

KAREN C. KOSSUTH
Unmarked Definite NPs and Referential
Cohesion in Old Icelandic Narrative
0. Introduction
The fabric of narrative is woven on the woof of cohesive semantic
functions including anaphora and deixis, substitution and ellipsis
(Halliday and Hasan 1976). The semantic function underlying definite-
ness in Old Icelandic, anaphora, is the reference to entities previously
mentioned in the narrative or already known to both narrator and
listener.
1. Definiteness and historical typology
Every language has a way of differentiating known entities from
unknown ones, and the types of anaphoric devices employed by a
particular language are also indices to its position on the typological
scale (Greenberg 1966; Li & Thompson 1976). In Old Icelandic, ana-
phoric noun phrases are generally marked either by a suffixed definite
article or by pronominalization. Therefore, a study of the use of definite
articles in Old Icelandic can reveal something about the position of Old
Icelandic in the typological continuum ranging from reconstructed
Proto-Germanic, which used no definite article, to modern Continental
Scandinavian, which uses the definite for abstract and generic terms as
well as for the marking of anaphora. By Greenberg’s 1978 criteria,
Proto-Germanic was at Stage Zero of the definite article, and modern
Continental Scandinavian is in early Stage II of a cycle containing three
stages: I) definite article, II) non-generic article, III) noun marker. Both
Old and Modern Icelandic are in parts of Stage I:
„Since the most common origin of the definite article is the demon-
strative, .. . we might speak of the demonstrative as stage zero ...
[The definite article] develops from a purely deictic element which
has come to identify an element as previously mentioned in dis-
course .. . The point at which a discourse deictic becomes a definite