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# Familiar vs. unique in a diachronic perspective. Case study of the rise of the definite article in North Germanic

**Authors:** Alicja Piotrowska, Dominika Skrzypek · **Year:** 2021 · **Venue:** Glossa: a journal of general linguistics **Link:** [glossa-journal.org/article/id/5471](https://www.glossa-journal.org/article/id/5471/) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

[**3** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W3180737583) openalex · 2026-10-18[Glossa: a journal of general linguistics](https://openalex.org/S4210226983)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.1178)
- [PDF](https://www.glossa-journal.org/article/5471/galley/11185/download)
- [DOI 10.5334/gjgl.1178](https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.1178)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W3180737583)

**Authors (2)**

1. [Alicja Piotrowska](https://openalex.org/A5065663281) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9868-2964) · h 3 · 91 citations · 40 works
2. [Dominika Skrzypek](https://openalex.org/A5013921900) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9277-4622) · h 5 · 99 citations · 60 works

Citations and author metrics from openalex (2026-10-18); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

The suffixed definite article of North Germanic grew out of a demonstrative. The paper asks whether it spread first to noun phrases whose referent is familiar from the text (direct anaphora) or to noun phrases whose referent is unique in the world or situation. The corpus is about 280,000 words of Old Swedish, Old Danish and Old Icelandic texts from 1200 to 1550, in three periods, with 9,363 annotated noun phrases. Logistic regression models are fitted with period and the type of reference as factors. The main result is that the definite article is much more frequent with familiar referents than with unique ones in every period, already in the oldest texts. Among unique referents, the locally unique ones (grounded in specific knowledge) take the article more often than globally unique ones (grounded in encyclopaedic knowledge). The authors read this as a path from familiarity to uniqueness, with local uniqueness as the bridge.

## Ideas

- I1. `coref/src/sieve.rs` and `prag` (roles): tag each definite noun phrase in an English text as familiar (it has an antecedent in the same chain) or unique (a closed list of world-unique nouns, or a local-scope cue). Count definite article use by class in a count table in BTreeMap order, and report the split for each text.
- I2. Use the paper's split (familiar, local unique, global unique) as a feature for the decision list that predicts "the" versus bare noun in Mova's generator, and measure accuracy on held-out text.
- I3. The paper gives the counts for its three periods; a matching Early Modern English split (Shakespeare, KJV) would test whether the same familiar-first pattern holds for English. Report it with the period buckets, and keep the test set untouched until release.

## For Mova

The chapters are [12. Pronouns, determiners and numerals](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/12-pronouns-determiners-numerals/) (articles and determiners), [35. Reference and coreference](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/35-reference-and-coreference/) (familiarity and anaphora) and [10. Vocabulary: archaic words and false friends](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en-x-emode/10-vocabulary/) (the early uses). The code is `coref/src/sieve.rs` and `prag`. The measure: the article split by reference class, on an English sample, and the accuracy of the `the`/bare decision list. The paper is about North Germanic; for English the parallel is the Old English demonstrative and the Early Modern use.

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [DOI 10.5334/gjgl.1178](https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.1178)

```
@article{piotrowska2021familiar,
  title = {{Familiar vs. unique in a diachronic perspective. Case study of the rise of the definite article in North Germanic}},
  author = {Piotrowska, Alicja and Skrzypek, Dominika},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2021},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.1178},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.1178}
}
```

- [← previous Pragmatic and Logical Inferences in NLI Systems: The Case of Conjunction Buttressing](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/pedinotti-2022-pragmatic-logical-inferences-nli-systems/)
- [next → Using Syntax to Disambiguate Explicit Discourse Connectives in Text](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/pitler-2009-syntax-disambiguate-explicit-discourse-connectives/)
- [↑ back to English](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/en/)

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33. TO CITE THIS ARTICLE: Piotrowska, Alicja and Dominika Skrzypek. 2021. Familiar vs. unique in a diachronic perspective. Case study of the rise of the definite article in North Germanic. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 6(1): 91. 1–21. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.1178 [↗](https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.1178) [our card](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/piotrowska-2021-familiar-vs-unique-diachronic-perspective/)
34. Submitted: 18 December 2019 Accepted: 28 December 2020 Published: 08 July 2021 [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Submitted%3A+18+December+2019+Accepted%3A+28+December+2020+Published%3A+08+July+2021)
35. COPYRIGHT: © 2021 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See [http://](http://) creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Open Library of Humanities. [↗](http://)