1.2. The Rise of Article

There was one more category which became characteristic of Germanic nouns though not considered to be a grammatical one. It is the category of “definiteness/indefiniteness” which was not inherited from PIE being Germanic innovation. Its emergence was stipulated by the rise of article.

The rise of the articles was preceded by the article-like usage of notional parts of speech. Thus, the rise of the definite article was prepared by the usage of demonstrative pronoun in this function. It was accompanied by the fixation of a demonstrative pronoun in certain syntactic positions and its delexicalization in the “pre-article” function, i.e. partial loss of its semantics and syntactic autonomy, which took place in the course of time.

By the 10^th century a one-article system comprising the opposition “definite article – zero article” was established in Germanic languages due to achieved regularity of a marker of definiteness. Zero article was peculiar for abstract nouns, while definite article – for concrete ones.

The next stage of the development of the category was marked the expansion of the number of nouns regularly used with articles and thus, by the transition from a one-article to a two-article system which involved all Germanic languages except Icelandic and Faroese.

The formation of the opposition “definite article – indefinite article” was concerned with the expansion of the use of an article, mainly its usage with general nouns.

The prototype of the indefinite article was a numeral “one”. All modern Germanic languages, except Icelandic and Faroese, have both the definite and the indefinite articles, e.g. English a, the; Dutch een, de; German ein, eine, der, die, das.

The process of the indefinite article formation differed in Germanic languages and nowadays its usage varies in them as well. Thus, in most languages the indefinite article is used to introduce a particular thing or person. In some languages the indefinite article is used as the marker of gender distinction, e.g. in Swedish, Norwegian and Danish the indefinite article ett (et) is only used with the neuters.

The usage of the definite article is also marked by certain peculiarities in separate Germanic languages, e.g. the definite article in the Scandinavian languages is used as a suffix, the choice of the form depending on the gender distinction. Such postpositional article in Scandinavian languages is used parallel to the article which is used before ‘Adj. + N’.

The postpositional articles are declined in Swedish, Norwegian and Danish as well as prepositional ones in e.g. German.

To sum it up, the emergence of the category of definiteness/indefiniteness resulting from the formation of article opposition led to 1) the expansion of auxiliary parts of speech; 2) the transition from an inflexional system of a noun to an inflexional-analytical one; 3) the division of the Germanic languages into one-article languages (Icelandic and Faroese) and two-article languages (all the rest); 4) differentiation into the languages with an independent article and those with a suffixed article (Scandinavian languages).