Advances in the Syntax of DPs - Structure, agreement, and case

chapter 10

Determiners and possessives in

Old English and Polish

Artur Bartnik

John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin

This paper examines the functional structure of the nominal phrase of the two

article-less languages Polish and Old English. First, we will review the most

important approaches towards the introduction of functional projections that

have been proposed in the literature. Then we will argue for the introduction of

the functional layer above the lexical one in both languages despite the fact that

they both have no articles. We will also notice striking similarities between Old

English and Polish, the languages belonging to two different families. The data

will be collected, among other sources, from electronic corpora.

1. Introduction

This paper investigates patterns in which determiners^1 and possessives co-occur in
Old English and Polish noun phrases, as illustrated in (1) and (2) below:

(1) a. þæs his cwides
that.sg.m.gen his saying.sg.m.gen
‘his saying’
(coblick,LS17.1[MartinMor[BlHom_17]]:215.79.2742)^2
b. ten mój projekt
this.sg.nom my.sg.nom project.sg.nom
‘my project’
(IJPPAN_k123574, Jacek Bocheński 2009: 1, ‘Tyberiusz Cezar’)

1. In this paper ‘determiner’ will be used as a cover term to denote demonstratives and articles,
   as shown by the Old English examples in (1) and (2). In this way we want to emphasize that in
   some contexts the forms function as demonstratives, and in others as definite articles.


2. All the examples taken from The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose
   YCO (Taylor et al. 2003) and The National Corpus of Polish, NKJP (Bańko et al. 2012) contain
   all the information and coding conventions used in the corpora necessary to identify them.