Determiners and possessives in Old English and Polish 265
We have also discussed the syntactic status of determiners in Old English and
Polish. It turns out that the possessive-determiner order is a litmus test for definite
articles. In other words, determiners occurring pre-nominally in this combination
must be definite articles. This is what we find in Old English and Polish. The claim
that Polish ten, ta, to can function as definite articles is further supported by the deter-
miner systems from other Slavic languages/dialects as well as from bridging contexts
in Polish.
We have also hypothesized that the influence of English upon Polish grammar
might be a triggering factor in the development of a definite article in the future, simi-
larly to the situation found in Old English.
References
Allen, Cynthia. 2006. Possessives and determiners in Old English. In Types of Variation:
Diachronic, Dialectal and Typological Interfaces [Studies in Language Companion Series
76], Terttu Nevalainen, Juhani Klemola & Mikko Laitinen (eds), 149–170. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins.
Arabski, Janusz. 2006. Language transfer in language learning and language contact. In Cross-
linguistic Influences in the Second Language Lexicon, Janusz Arabski (ed.), 12–21. Clevedon:
Multilingual Matters.
Bacz, Barbara. 1991. On some article-like uses of the demonstrative ten [this] in Polish. Could
ten become an article? Langues et Linguistique 17: 1–16.
Bańko, Mirosław, Górski, Rafał L., Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Barbara, Łaziński, Marek, Pęzik,
Piotr & Przepiórkowski, Adam. 2012. Narodowy Korpus Języka Polskiego [National Corpus
of the Polish Language]. Warszawa: IPI PAN.
Bartnik Artur. 2007. Categorial heterogeneity: OE determiners. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 43:
75–96.
Bartnik, Artur. 2011. Noun Phrase Structure in Old English. Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL.
Borsley, Robert & Roberts Ian. 1996. The Syntax of the Celtic languages. Cambridge: CUP.
Czardybon, Adrian. 2013. Definiteness and concept types in Polish. A paper presented at Lan-
guages with and without Articles 2013. Workshop, Université Paris 8, France.
Fischer, Olga. 2000. The position of the adjective in Old English. In Generative Theory and Cor-
pus Studies: A Dialogue from 10 ICEHL, Ricardo Bermudez-Otero, David Denison, Richard
M. Hogg & Chris B. McCully (eds), 153–81. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Giusti, Giuliana. 1997. The categorial status of determiners. In The New Comparative Syntax,
Liliane Haegeman (ed.), 95–123. London: Longman.
Heusler, Andreas. 1962. Altislandisches Elementarbuch [Germanische Bibliothek 1]. Heidelberg:
Carl Winter.
Kytö, Merja & Rissanen, Matti. 1993. By and by enters [this] my artificiall foole... who, when
Jack beheld, sodainely he flew at him: Searching for syntactic constructions in the Helsinki
Corpus. In Early English in the Computer Age: Explorations Through the Helsinki Corpus,
Matti Rissanen, Merja Kytö & Minna Palander-Collin (eds), 253–266. Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter.