Indirect anaphora in a diachronic perspective: The case of Danish and Swedish

In this paper, I offer a diachronic analysis of indirect anaphora (associative
anaphora), paying particular attention to the anchoring of the anaphor and the
variation between definite and possessive NPs which appear in this type of bridging
in Danish and Swedish between 1220 and 1550. The study is based on a corpus of
authentic texts evenly distributed across languages and genres. I argue that the
expression of indirect anaphora is a crucial stage in the grammaticalization of the
definite article, and that the study of the spread of the incipient definite article
through this context can be described in terms of strong and weak definiteness