The relationship between inflectional case marking and the emergence of definite and indefinite articles has long been hypothesized but seldom examined quantitatively. This study presents a large-scale statistical analysis of the relationship across …
Grammaticalization is characterized by robust directional asymmetries (e.g., Kuteva et al. 2019). For instance, body-part nominals develop into spatial adpositions, minimizers develop into negation markers, and subject pronouns become agreement …
Although the Old Irish article in is standardly described as a marker of definiteness, it also co-occurs with indefinite nouns. This phenomenon has long been known in the literature, but thus far even an adequate descriptive account of it has proven …