Home > Catalogue > Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie occidentale > 50 | 2016 > Accented and Deaccented Definite Determiners in Notker’s Translation of Boethius’ De Consolatione Philosophiae

Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie occidentale | Vol. 50 | September 2016

« previous article | next article »
cover
cover
Research Article

Accented and Deaccented Definite Determiners in Notker’s Translation of Boethius’ De Consolatione Philosophiae

Chiara De Bastiani    Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Italia    

VIEW PDF DOWNLOAD PDF

abstract

In Notker’s translation of De Consolatione Philosophiae definite determiners receive a graphic accent in anaphoric and endophoric contexts, while determiners are not accented when the noun they precede denotes an abstract or unical entity. The study is based on Books I, II and III of Notker’s translation of Boethius’ text, and on a sub-categorization of Nominal Expressions which builds on the distinction between Semantic and Pragmatic Definites. I conclude that the evidence in Notker’s text supports the hypothesis of the presence of two articles in Old High German; I propose the feature of contextual identifiability that regulates the choice between the two forms of the article.

Published
Sept. 30, 2016
Accepted
July 12, 2016
Submitted
April 12, 2016
Language
EN

Keywords: Definite determiners • Accented articles • Nokter • De Consolatione Philophiae

permalink http://doi.org/10.14277/2499-1562/AnnOc-50-16-3

Copyright: © 2016 Chiara De Bastiani. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.