Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper, I discuss the emergence of articles, the and a/an, in the history of English. The indefinite article a/an appeared later than the definite article the in English. This phenomenon is also to be observed in other languages（Abraham 1997, Lyons 1999）. Furthermore, there are marked asymmetries between the definite and indefinite articles in terms of both semantics and distribution （Christophersen 1939, Lyons 1999, Crisma 2011, Dryer and Haspelmath 2013）. Here I try to elucidate the reasons for these asymmetries. The articles the and a/an are believed to have developed from the Old English demonstrative se/seo and the numeral an ‘one’（cf. Sommerer 2011）. This is an instantiation of grammaticalization（Hopper and Traugott 2003）. I assume that a syntactic determiner system, DP（Abney 1987）, was absent in Old English. Based on an examination of The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose（YCOE）, and The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English, Phase II（PPCME2）, I claim that se/seo contributed to this grammaticalization（primary grammaticalization）, while an was grammaticalized as a result of this primary grammaticalization. In my hypothesis, grammaticalization means creating a functional space in a given structure. In this case, a space has been established before a noun in anominal structure. Therefore, although depending on the properties of nominals, the use of determiners has become obligatory in Present-day English（cf. Gelderen 1993, 2000）. Se/seo contributed to the creation of this space, while an was later grammticalized in the determiner space created by se/seo .Hence, the time difference in their appearance can be accounted for in this way.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.032 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".