Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International ... - STIBA Malang

10 Ans van Kemenade, Tanja Milicev & R. Harald Baayen
It should be noted that they are not topic/focus markers, in the sense that they
cliticize morpho-syntactically to elements in order to mark them as presuppositional
or focal, rather they seem to indicate that what follows is the focus part
of the clause. The same kind of presupposition-focus inferences can very likely
be obtained by specific structural re-organizations without these adverbs. However,
the overwhelming presence of these two particular adverbs strongly suggests
that overt marking of presupposition-focus domains is of primary concern for OE
writers.
Our hypothesis is that the adverbs structure parts of the utterance/proposition
itself with respect to the preceding discourse.
(15) [previous discourse] [ utterance presupposition þa/þonne focus]
This will be elaborated further in Section 2.3.
2.2 More referring expressions
Old English had a wider range of discourse-referential expressions than Presentday
English does. In particular, Old English morpho-syntax includes the weak
demonstrative pronouns. Let us first list the paradigms which can be picked from
any grammar of Old English (Table 3).
Table 3. Old English demonstrative pronouns
singular plural
masculine feminine neuter
Nom se sēo þæt þā
Acc þone þā þæt þā
Gen þæs þæ¯ re þæs þāra
Dat þæ¯ m þæ¯ re þæ¯ m þæ¯ m
Demonstrative pronouns are often called ‘definite determiners’, as one of their primary
known uses in Old English is to mark definiteness in a NP, thus se monn “the
man”; þæ¯ re fæmnan fæder; “the woman’s father” and so on (see recently Denison
2006). However, the term ‘determiner’ is, we claim, a singular misnomer, in particular
because it is often used when comparing the Old English weak demonstratives
to the Present-day English definite determiners. Determiners (we refer
here to the, not to deictic demonstratives such as this, that, these, those) are clearly
morphologically invariant and cannot be used independently. In comparison, Old
English demonstratives are a rather versatile class. While they mark definiteness
like the Present-day English determiners do, they can also be used as independent
pronouns.