Accented and Deaccented Definite Determiners in Notker's Translation of Boethius' De Consolatione Philosophae

In Notker’s translation of De Consolatione Philosophiae definite determiners receive a graphic accent in anaphoric and endophoric contexts, while determiners are not accented when the noun they precede denotes an abstract or unical entity. The study is based on Books I, II and III of Notker’s translation of Boethius’ text, and on a sub-categorization of Nominal Expressions which builds on the distinction between Semantic and Pragmatic Definites. I conclude that the evidence in Notker’s text supports the hypothesis of the presence of two articles in Old High German; I propose the feature of contextual identifiability that regulates the choice between the two forms of the article.