On the emergence of personal articles in the history of Catalan

Abstract

The grammaticalization of personal articles in Ibero-Romance, in general, and in Catalan, in particular, is discussed in this contribution. The personal articles proceed historically from the Latin noun dominus / domina ‘lord, master / lady, madam’, used for society’s upper class, and appear nowadays only with [+human] proper names. Firstly, it developed into an honorific marker in Old Ibero-Romance, and in modern Catalan into a generic personal article without honorific meaning. Their evolution is conceived as a cyclic change, whereby phrasal (adjectival) elements occupying specifier positions first develop into X° heads, and eventually into (clitic) affixes in the form of articles, while the Old Ibero-Romance honorifics are XPs (and not heads). This cyclic change comprises phonological, morphological, syntactic, and also semantic shifts.