The emergence of determiner - secondary determiner units in English and their impact on the determiner system.

The determiner in English noun phrases can be accompanied by a secondary determiner e.g. the same, such a, to make the referential information more precise: such a man, does not refer to just "a man", but to one corresponding to a previously described type. In contrast to other modifiers in the noun phrase, e.g. happy and young in a happy young man, secondary determiners do not modify the noun, but are dependent on the determiner, with shich they function as a complex determiner unit. It has not been investigated how this atypical complex structure emerged in the noun phrase. This is the central research question this project seeks to answer. I will investigate which factors made the emergence possible, why there are pre and postdeterminers, and what impact the emergence of complex determiners had on the semantics and the formal features of the (simple) determiner. The questions will be approached from a Construction Grammar perspective, distinguishing between constructions of varying schematicity, relating the unit's internal functional structure to its external functions in the noun phrase, and offering an integrated but fine-grained analysis of the formal and semantic features and their gradual (re)organization and fixation in the development of (complex) determiners.

Keywords:Construction grammar, Determiners, English linguistics, Noun phrase, language change

Disciplines:Theory and methodology of literary studies