Hanna Kędzierska

The aim of this paper is to assess the change of Polish numeral jeden ‘one’ into an indefinite marker in the view of the grammaticalization theory. Although Slavic languages are principally believed not to possess articles, certain usages of one (e.g., in Bulgarian and Macedonian) demonstrate the same features as the ones ascribed to the usages of indefinite articles in non-Slavic languages, such as English, German or Italian. Language contact of article-possessing languages is often claimed to enhance the grammaticalisation process of an indefinite article (Heine and Kuteva 2006). This type of grammaticalisation is said to follow five distinctive stages: (i) numeral, (ii) presentative marker, (iii) specific marker, (iv) non-specific marker and (v) generalized article (e.g., Givón 1981, Heine 1997). We assessed that in the case of Polish, the grammaticalisation stage is that of a specific marker, with some occasional uses leaning towards the non-specific marker stage. The conclusion was supported by the results of 53 native speakers’ judgments as well as the diagnostic tests based on relevant literature.

The main aim of the reported study is to establish the stage of grammaticalisation of the indefinite article in Polish by contributing the results of a corpus study. We selected and analysed 20.000 sentences containing the word jeden. The obtained results demonstrate that the uses of jeden as a presentative marker and a specific marker have been both attested, which would suggest that Polish numeral has already reached the specific marker stage. Based on the statistical analysis carried out for the obtained results, a statistically significant increase in the use of jeden as an indefinite marker has been revealed. This may be interpreted as evidence for the grammaticalisation phenomena, enhanced by language contacts with article-possessing languages (English and German).