The Diachrony of Definiteness in North Germanic

This book is an account of the rise of definite and indefinite articles in Danish, Swedish and Icelandic, as documented in a choice of extant texts from 1200-1550. These three North Germanic languages show different development patterns in the rise of articles, despite the common origin, but each reveals interdependencies between the two processes.
The matter is approached from both a quantitative and a qualitative perspective. The statistical analysis provides an improved overview on article grammaticalization, focusing on the factors at the basis of such process. The in-depth qualitative analysis of longer text passages places the crucial stage of the definite article grammaticalization with the so-called indirect anaphoric reference.

Dominika Skrzypek, Ph.D. (2004), Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, is Professor of Scandinavian Linguistics. She has published monographs and articles on the history of the Scandinavian languages, including The Decline of the Nominal Inflection in Old Swedish (Lund University, 2005).

Alicja Piotrowska, MA (2017), Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, is a PhD student at that university. She has published articles on the history of the Swedish language and a monograph on the group genitive in Modern Swedish (Adam Mickiewicz University, 2017).

Rafal Jaworski, Ph.D. (2013), Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, is Assistant Professor at the Department of Artificial Intelligence. He builds natural language processing algorithms, which can be applied in semi-automatic linguistic analysis.