THE ORIGIN OF THE CLITICNESS OF THE WEST GER.."1.iANIC DEFINITE ARTICLE: THE CASE OF Beowulf

The present paper is mainly concerned with the definite ar-ticle of Beowulf. The literature about the West Germanie defini-te article has always a-llotted a prime place among the old Ger-manic texts to this poem: it is undisputably archaic (Krihn 1933: 105, D. Hofmann 1959:189), and suitable for statistical geriera-lisations. Its more than 6,OOO hemistichs contain about 300 ·in-stances of the. definite article (Lichtenheld 1872:332). 1 Let me remind you of the long-known distinction between what Kuhn (1933:4-5) called satzpartikel ahd Satzteilpartik-el. Both terms refer to unaccented or weakly-accented-words: in broad outli·ne, a satzpart-ikel is a syntactic constituent at the clause level (e. g. a pronominal subject), a satzt::ei-lpartikel is a con-stituent within a syntactic constituent at the clause''ievel or below it (e. g. a preposition within a prepositional phrase). Concerning the satzpartikeln of Germanic, Kuhn (1933:8) fornnl: