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98
6. Conclusion
Karen C. Kossuth
In summary, except for the unmarked definiteness of topical ana-
phoric NPs, Old Icelandic conforms already to the distribution of
definite/indefinite marking in discourse as it is established in Modem
English. An unmarked noun may be indefinite, but it may instead be
the topic which is definite. Unmarked topics should be high in topi-
cality, thus human, singular, and important, and they are most often
subject in a clause with verb initial word order. In this fashion the
semantic factors of singular number and humanness interact with the
syntactic ones of word order and grammatical relation to clarify a
morphologically ambiguous marking.
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