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two hundred years later than the earlier works, and were therefore likely show some
change in the use of definite articles. The specific works were chosen due to ease of
access. They were either in the ASU Library, or available from an electronic source.
As stated in 1.3, the purpose of this study was to determine if the current use of
the definite article in modern Romance languages might be due to diffusion. If the
percentages for the total number of nouns with a definite article are similar in each time
period, it is safe to say it is due to independent development through grammaticalization,
and not diffusion. If, however, one language is noticeably higher in one of the time
periods, especially the late thirteenth century, diffusion is at least possible.
I counted every noun with a definite article, and every bare noun, without any
article or other determiner. Certain other words, especially quantifiers, normally preclude
the use of articles as well, and so these were not counted. This includes nouns modified
by numbers. Occasionally, a noun modified by a quantifier was used with a definite
article, especially in Bembo's work. These were counted, otherwise, they were not.
Sometimes, definite articles were used in phrases that were more pronominal than
nominal. For example, l'uon was used in Il Fiore as an indefinite pronoun, like “one” in
English or on in French. In other cases, it was used with long form possessives as
pronouns, or with “one” and “other” to refer to some vague or even unknown referent. In
these cases, I did not count the words used with a definite article.
I photocopied pages from the texts or printed them from an electronic source, and
then marked the nouns used with a definite article in green, and those used without any
article or other word that would have blocked the use of an article in pink. I then counted
the number of nouns on each page, and added them together for the total number in each