Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1981, Page 88

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Karen C. Kossuth
article is where it becomes compulsory and has spread to a point
at which it means ‘identified’ in general, thus including typically
things known from context, general knowledge, or as with ‘the sun’
in non-scientific discourse, identified because it is the only member
of its class. Such an article may, as with German der, be an un-
stressed variant of the demonstrative, which continues in its former
use in stressed form“ (Greenberg 1978:61).
The definite article developed late in Germanic, probably appearing
not long before historic times (Haugen 1976:160). That it developed
well after the clear division into separate Germanic language families is
shown in part by the different lexical items employed; West Germanic
adopted the í/z-demonstrative (English the, German der), whereas Norse
took the /z-demonstrative, hin-. The fact that Norse suffixed the definite
article, but West Germanic prefixed it, can also be taken as evidence
for relatively late development.
2. Anaphora
2.1 Definiteness and Referential Cohesion
In spite of the lexical and morphological differences between North
and West Germanic articles, the function of the definite article in earlier
Germanic is basically the same (Hodler 1954:15-17): It indicates a
known quantity, Greenberg’s Stage I. In connected texts, it is a kind of
narrative shorthand reminding the listener that the definite noun is not
new information, but that its identity is recoverable, so needs no more
definition. Thus, for Old Icelandic as well as for modem English, „the
presence of the creates a link between the sentence in which it itself
occurs and that containing the referential information; in other words,
it is cohesive.“ (Halliday & Hasan 1976:74). Halliday and Hasan
(1976:71-72) describe four uses of the definite article, which they call
anaphoric, cataphoric, exophoric and endophoric. It is possible to find
examples for all of those in Old Icelandic. A few such examples follow:
a) NPs identifiable from the context, that is, exophorically definite:
(1) Fara nú, til þess er þau koma fyrir bœinn
3 pl ADV CONJ NOM 3 pl ACC-DEF
(They) go now, until they reach the farm