Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Home
  • Home
EnglishFrançais
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique

Article contents

Latin UNUS and the discourse properties of unity cardinals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 July 2020

Gerhard Schaden
Gerhard Schaden
Affiliation:
Université de Lille & CNRS UMR 8163 STL
Corresponding
E-mail address:
gerhard.schaden@univ-lille.fr
Get access
Rights & Permissions[Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article investigates the discourse behaviour of Latin unus (‘one’) in the Vulgate, in order to better understand the starting point of the grammaticalization process ultimately leading to an indefinite article. To this end, I will study unity cardinals in general, focusing particularly on English one. Empirically, it will be shown that unus behaved like a unity cardinal in late Latin, without showing any clear sign of ongoing grammaticalization towards an indefinite article. I will try to explain the discursive behaviour of unity cardinals with reference to antipresuppositions, within the framework of the game of same and different. Finally, I will sketch how the results fit within the general picture of the incipient grammaticalization of indefinite articles, by providing an account of so far unexplained scope phenomena.

Résumé

Résumé

Le présent article étudie le comportement discursif de unus (‘un’) dans la Vulgate, pour atteindre une meilleure compréhension du début du processus de grammaticalisation qui mène vers les articles indéfinis. Pour ce faire, j’étudierai les cardinaux d'unité plus en général, dont principalement one en anglais, dans le cadre du jeu de l'identité et de la différence. D'un point de vue empirique, je montrerai que unus se comporte comme un cardinal d'unité, sans montrer des signes clairs d'une grammaticalisation vers un article indéfini. J'essaierai d'expliquer le comportement discursif de cardinaux d'unité par les antiprésuppositions, dans le cadre du jeu de l'identité et de la différence. Pour finir, je fournirai une esquisse de la manière dont les résultats cadrent avec le début de la grammaticalisation des articles indéfinis, en donnant une analyse pour des phénomènes de portée qui étaient jusqu’à maintenant restés sans explication.

Keywords

UNUS unity cardinals Vulgate discourse grammaticalization UNUS cardinaux d'unité Vulgate discours grammaticalisation
Type
Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 65 , Special Issue 3: Formal Diachronic Semantics , September 2020 , pp. 438 - 470
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association/Association canadienne de linguistique 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below.
If you should have access and can't see this content please contact technical support.

Footnotes

I had the opportunity to present previous versions of this article at workshops at the universities of Paris 7 and Paris 8, and at the 2016 conference on Formal Diachronic Semantics in Konstanz, and I would like to thank the organizers and the audience for their helpful feedback. I would particularly like to thank Claire Beyssade, who convinced me to abandon my initial approach. I am also extremely grateful for the remarks and criticisms of the anonymous reviewers and the editors of this issue, which have allowed me to improve this article considerably. Igor Yanovich deserves special credit for his patience and never-ending efforts to bring the article into a publishable state. Finally, Heather Newell did a great job editing the final paper. All remaining errors and omissions are mine alone. This article is dedicated to the memory of Helmut Häusle.

References

Abbott, Barbara. 2004. Definiteness and indefiniteness. In The handbook of Pragmatics, ed. Horn, Laurence R. and Ward, Gregory, 122–149. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Ahern, Christopher, and Clark, Robin. 2017. Conflict, cheap talk, and Jespersen's cycle. Semantics and Pragmatics 10(11): Early Access. doi: 10.3765/sp.10.11.Google Scholar
Aland, Barbara, et al. , eds. 2012. Novum testamentum graece, 28th ed. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft. URL http://www.nestle-aland.com/en/read-na28-online/.Google Scholar
Amsili, Pascal, and Beyssade, Claire. 2016. Le même ou un autre: l'expression de l'identité et de la différence en discours. Travaux de linguistique 72(1): 11–28. doi: 10.3917/tl.072.0011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baldi, Philip, and Cuzzolin, Pierluigi, eds. 2009. New perspectives on historical Latin syntax. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Barbiers, Sjef. 2005. Variation in the morphosyntax of one. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 8: 159–183.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barbiers, Sjef. 2007. Indefinite numerals one and many and the cause of ordinal suppletion. Lingua 117: 859–880.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beyssade, Claire. 2017. Sous le sens. Pour une sémantique multidimensionnelle. Sciences du langage. Saint-Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes.Google Scholar
Borer, Hagit. 2005. In name only. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Brasoveanu, Adrian, and Farkas, Donka F.. 2011. How indefinites choose their scope. Linguistics and Philosophy 34(1): 1–55. doi: 10.10007/s10988-011-9092-7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Büring, Daniel. 2016. Intonation and meaning. Oxford Surveys in Semantics and Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burton, Philip. 2013. The Latin version of the New Testament. In The text of the New Testament in contemporary research. Essays on the Status Quaestionis, ed. Ehrman, Bart D. and Holmes, Michael W., 2nd ed., 167–200. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Calboli, Gualtiero. 2009. Latin syntax and Greek. In Baldi and Cuzzolin (2009), 65–194.Google Scholar
Carlier, Anne. 2001. La genèse de l'article un. Langue française 130(1): 65–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carlier, Anne. 2013. Grammaticalization in progress in Old French: Indefinite articles. In Research on Old French: The state of the art, ed. Arteaga, Deborah L., 45–60. Dordrecht: Springer.Google Scholar
Coleman, Robert. 1991. Italic. In Indo-European numerals, ed. Gvozdanović, Jadranka, 389–448. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Crisma, Paola. 2015. The “indefinite article” from cardinal to operator to expletive. In Language change at the syntax-semantics interface, ed. Gianollo, Chiara, Jäger, Agnes, and Penka, Doris, 125–152. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Dahl, Deborah Anna. 1985. The structure and function of One–anaphora in English. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club.Google Scholar
Dahl, Östen. 2001. Grammaticalization and the life-cycles of constructions. RASK — Internationalt tidsskrift for sprog og kommunikation [International Journal for Language and Communication] 14: 91–134.Google Scholar
Davies, Mark. 2008–. COCA: The corpus of contemporary American English: 520 million words, 1990–present. Available online at: http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.Google Scholar
Geurts, Bart. 2011. Quantity implicatures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Givón, Talmy. 1981. On the development of the numeral ‘one’ as an indefinite marker. Folia Linguistica Historica 2(1): 35–53.Google Scholar
Grønn, Atle, and Sæbø, Kjell Johan. 2012. A, The, Another: A game of same and different. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 21(1): 75–93. doi: 10.1007/s10849-011-9148-7.Google Scholar
Harsch, Ulrich. 1996–. Bibliotheca augustana. URL https://www.hs-augsburg.de/~harsch/augustana.html.Google Scholar
Haug, Dag T. T., and Jøndal, Maris L.. 2008. Creating a parallel treebank of the old Indo-European bible translation. In Proceedings of the second workshop on language technology for cultural heritage data (LaTeCH 2008), ed. Sporleder, Caroline and Ribarov, Kiril, 27–34. Marrakech.Google Scholar
Hawkins, John A. 1991. On (in)definite articles: Implicatures and (un)grammaticality prediction. Journal of Linguistics 27(2): 405–442.Google Scholar
Heim, Irene. 1988. The semantics of definite and indefinite noun phrases. New York: Garland.Google Scholar
Heim, Irene. 1991. Artikel und Definitheit [Articles and definitness]. In Semantics: An international handbook of contemporary research, ed. von Stechow, Arnim and Wunderlich, Dieter, 487–535. Berlin: de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Heine, Bernd. 1997. Cognitive foundations of grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hodges, Zane C., and Farstad, Arthur L., eds. 1985. The Greek New Testament according to the Majority Text, 2nd ed. Thomas Nelson. URL https://archive.org/details/HFGNT/.Google Scholar
Horn, Laurence R. 1989. A natural history of negation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Houghton, H.A.G. 2016. The Latin New Testament. A guide to its early history, texts, and manuscripts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kamp, Hans, and Reyle, Uwe. 1993. From discourse to logic. Introduction to modeltheoretic semantics of natural language, formal logic and discourse representation theory. Dordrecht: Kluwer.Google Scholar
Kuteva, Tatiana, Heine, Bernd, Hong, Bo, Long, Halping, Narrog, Heiko, and Rhee, Seongha. 2019. World lexicon of grammaticalization, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Metzger, Bruce M., and Ehrman, Bart D.. 2005. The text of the New Testament. Its transmission, corruption and restoration, 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Newman, Hillel I. 2016. How should we measure Jerome's Hebrew competence? In Jerome of Stridon: His life, writings and legacy, 131–140. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Percus, Orin. 2006. Antipresuppositions. In Theoretical and empirical studies of reference and anaphora: Toward the establishment of generative grammar as an empirical science, ed. Ueyama, Ayumi, 52–73. Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.Google Scholar
Pozas Loyo, Julia. 2010. The development of the indefinite article in Medieval and Golden-Age Spanish. Doctoral dissertation, Queen Mary University, London.Google Scholar
Reinhart, Tanya. 1997. Quantifier scope: How labor is divided between QR and choice functions. Linguistics and Philosophy 20: 335–397.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
van Rooy, Robert. 2004. Signalling games select Horn strategies. Linguistics and Philosophy 27: 493–527.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rubio, Gonzalo. 2009. Semitic influence in the history of Latin syntax. In Baldi and Cuzzolin (2009), 195–240.Google Scholar
Sauerland, Uli. 2008. Implicated presuppositions. In The discourse potential of underspecified structures, ed. Steube, Anita, 581–600. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Schaden, Gerhard. 2012. Modelling the Aoristic Drift of the Present Perfect as inflation. An essay in historical pragmatics. International Review of Pragmatics 4: 261–292.Google Scholar
Schaden, Gerhard. To appear (a). The game of same and different. A framework for analyzing determiner systems. In Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 24, ed. Schwab, Juliane. Osnabrück.Google Scholar
Schaden, Gerhard. To appear (b). The syntax and compositional semantics of English ‘one’. Lexique.Google Scholar
Schmid, Helmut. 1994. Probabilistic part-of-speech tagging using decision trees. In Proceedings of the international conference on new methods in language processing. Manchester, UK. URL http://www.cis.uni-muenchen.de/~schmid/tools/TreeTagger/data/tree-tagger1.pdf.Google Scholar
Steedman, Mark. 2012. Taking scope: The natural semantics of quantifiers. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
de la Villa, Jesús. 2010. Numerals. In New perspectives on historical Latin syntax, ed. Baldi, Philip and Cuzzolin, Pierluigi, vol. III: Constituent syntax: Quantification, numerals, possession, anaphora, 175–238. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar

Full text views

Full text views reflects PDF downloads, PDFs sent to Google Drive, Dropbox and Kindle and HTML full text views.

Total number of HTML views: 10
Total number of PDF views: 60 *
View data table for this chart

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between 24th July 2020 - 25th January 2021. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

Hostname: page-component-76cb886bbf-fv2z2 Total loading time: 0.304 Render date: 2021-01-25T02:32:21.217Z Query parameters: { "hasAccess": "0", "openAccess": "0", "isLogged": "0", "lang": "en" } Feature Flags: { "shouldUseShareProductTool": true, "shouldUseHypothesis": true, "isUnsiloEnabled": true, "metricsAbstractViews": false, "figures": false, "newCiteModal": false }

Send article to Kindle

To send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle.

Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Latin UNUS and the discourse properties of unity cardinals
Available formats
×

Send article to Dropbox

To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your <service> account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox.

Latin UNUS and the discourse properties of unity cardinals
Available formats
×

Send article to Google Drive

To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your <service> account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive.

Latin UNUS and the discourse properties of unity cardinals
Available formats
×
×

Reply to: Submit a response

Your details

Conflicting interests

Do you have any conflicting interests? *