Vocatives and Determinerless Weak Adjectives in Old English Prose

The determinerless weak adjective (DWA) in Old English (OE) refers to the weak adjective paradigm without accompanying a definite determiner. Both semantic and etymological examination reveals that it could perform an independent role as a definiteness marker before it underwent weakening and came to necessitate another definiteness marker. Unlike poetry, prose in OE had the DWA only in the vocative phrase whose extragrammatical or non-integration properties could make the DWA resist against diachronic erosion. Textual investigation confirms that the DWA often followed an exclamatory or the 2 nd person personal pronoun þu/ge. While the weak adjective in the former type still enjoyed the status of a definiteness marker, the one in the latter represented a weakened form demanding the presence of the pronoun, a definiteness marker. In terms of the cline of grammaticalization concerning definiteness, preponderance of the latter type proves that a substantial part of the weak adjective underwent weakening into an affix even in the vocative. Moreover, textual evidence such as the strong form after the personal pronoun and the split of the inflection paradigm between the coordinated adjectives even forecasted the ultimate demise of the weak adjective into a mere class marker.