Anne Carlier

Grammaticalization in Progress in Old French: Indefinite Articles

Cross-linguistically, indefinite articles tend to emerge later than definite articles. Old French has a full-fledged definite article, but the grammaticalization process leading to the indefinite articles un and du/des in Modern French is at an earlier stage than is commonly assumed. In Old French, uns is still close to its source meaning, the unity numeral, both in its quantitative dimension of uniqueness marker (‘only one’) and in its qualitative dimension of identity marker (‘one and the same’). It has nevertheless acquired a textual role, revealing its early article status: in line with its quantitative numeral meaning, uns in Old French delimits an entity and introduces it as a new prominent discourse referent. Yet because of its qualitative numeral meaning, uns can also introduce a new type of category. The third article found in Modern French, the partitive article, is not yet an article in Old French, but is instead intermediate between preposition and determiner. From a methodological viewpoint, this chapter illustrates how a synchronic analysis benefits from being combined with a diachronic study, as it allows us to correctly identify the source meaning of the articles, evaluate their evolutionary stage with respect to this source, and see how the article system fits into an overall picture of the grammaticalization path.