Personal names with articles – a quantitative approach
The referents of proper nouns are inherently cast as unique and identifiable, the two semantic
concepts most frequently appealed to in analyses of definiteness. Nevertheless, many languages
mark proper nouns with definite articles. What exactly is the function of such article usage, and
how does it arise? We approach this problem by looking at article usage with anthroponyms in
Hellenistic Greek.
The use of definite articles with anthroponyms is obligatory in Modern Greek. In Classical
and Hellenistic Greek, on the other hand, it is widely attested, but not obligatory, and opinions
differ on its function: to the extent that scholars have not dismissed it as ‘optional’, ‘redundant’
or ‘random’ (see references in Manolessou, I. and G. Horrocks, Meletes gia ten hellenike glosse
2007, pp. 224-236), they have singled out two factors:
• anaphoricity/textual deixis (the definite article is used to refer to persons mentioned earlier
in the discourse)
• topicality (the article is used to reinstate persons as topics)
Using a quantitative approach and data from the PROIEL corpus of New Testament Greek (available at http://foni.uio.no:3000), we find that neither of these two claims are accurate.
Articles are not topic markers with anthroponyms in Hellenistic Greek: there is no statistically
significant tendency in our data for names with articles to be topics more frequently than bare
ones. Nor are the articles topic shift markers: it is true that names with articles are more likely to
occur after an intervening topic, but they need not be topics themselves. Such use of the article is
rather an anaphoric resolution device: a pronoun would be harder to interpret in such a position.
Articles do seem to have an anaphoric function with anthroponyms, but of a peculiar kind:
We find that names with articles
• are more likely to be picked up in the further discourse than names without articles
• are used for main characters who play an active role in the narrative, it is not enough to be
mentioned a lot
The New Testament is conventionally divided into episodes, ‘pericopes’. We can measure how
important a character is in a specific pericope by looking at the number of mentions within that
pericope relative to its size. We find that names with articles are significantly more salient by this
measure than names without articles:
Book
Mark
Luke
Without article
0.013
0.013
With article
0.032
0.053
p-value (t-test)
0.0001584
0.0003821
We therefore conclude that in Hellenistic Greek anthroponyms with articles serve to ease anaphoric
resolution and that they mark participant saliency in an episode, marking referents that we mean
to go on talking about.
From a theoretical point of view, then, it is interesting to see that although the same definite
article can be used with common as well as proper nouns, its meaning is very different depending
on the type of the complement. We suggest that this is due to differing functional pressures: for
common nouns it is important to mark unique identifiability in the context, whereas this can be
taken for granted with proper nouns, thus allowing the cataphoric dimension to be more important.
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