The development of demonst pronouns
Demonstrative Pronouns:Demonstrative pronouns belong to an ancient class of words that goes back to two Indo-European roots – seand to. In OE the sound [Ө] started to dominate over the sound [s] due to the pressure of the system (the forms with the sound [Ө] were more numerous (see the table below)). Demonstrative pronouns in OE changed in Gender, Number, Case In MEthe Case system disappeared due to the fact that there were some homonymous forms and due to phonetic reduction. In NEthe Gender was lost due to the fact that there were some homonymous and the following changes happened to the pronouns marked with * in the table above: 1) se (M, Sg, Nom) – turned into the definite article “the; 2) sēo (F, Sg, Nom) – turned into the personal pronoun “she”; 3) þæt (N, Sg, Nom) – remained as the unchangeable demonstrative pronoun “that”; 4) þis (N, Sg, Nom) – remained as the unchangeable demonstrative pronoun “this”; 5)þý (M, Sg, Instr) – in OE was used in the comparative constructions like “the sooner…the better” but in NE was not distinguished any more phonetically and merged with the unchangeable form of the definite article “the”. The only category that was left in the demonstrative pronouns was the Number (e.g. ModE this – these, that – those).
Rise of Articles:The articles have to do with the category of Determination (definiteness /indefiniteness). Causes for Rise of Articles: 1)In OE the there were two declensions of adjectives – strong (definite) and weak (indefinite) – and the inflections of these declensions indicated whether the noun that followed the adjective was definite or indefinite. At the end of the ME Period the declensions of the Adjective disappeared and there was a necessity to find another way to indicate the definiteness/indefiniteness of a noun. Thus the articles appeared. 2) In OE the word-order was free because inflections were employed to show the relations of the words in a sentence. In ME and NE the majority of the inflections disappeared and the word-order became fixed. This meant that the first place in a sentence was usually occupied by the theme (information already known à marked with the definite article) and the second place – by the rheme (new information à marked with the indefinite article).
Definite Article:As it was mentioned above, the definite article appeared from the OE demonstrative pronoun se (M, Sg, Nom) from the paradigm of the OE demonstrative pronoun “that” because it was often used to indicate a definite object or notion.
Indefinite Article:The indefinite article appeared from the OE numeral ān (one) and had the meaning of “oneness” (it still indicates only nouns in Sg, i.e. nouns indicating one object or notion). In OE ān had 5-case paradigm that was lost in ME and only one form was left – oon/one. Later it was employed in the building of the indefinite article a/an.