Abstract
Predicate nominals designating single role holders like president, prime minister, queen or pope allow for variable article use in English. The default should be that single role holders do not combine with the indefinite article because they do not meet the numerical requirement, i.e. they do not constitute sets with more than one member (even if there is a succession of presidents, queens, etc.). Exceptions to the rule are “cases where two salient construals of the role holder designated by the predicate nominal are possible and, consequently two article patterns exist side by side” (Berezowski, 2009: 132). These construals are often motivated by extra-linguistic facts, like different religious traditions. But Berezowski’s study also shows that there is lexical variation as well as variation according to the copula verb used in the construction. In this chapter, I use data from the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) to investigate variable article use with single role predicate nominals in twentieth-century American English. Corpus data show that there is diachronic variation: a general tendency towards greater use of definite and indefinite articles in these constructions. However, there is also considerable lexical variation. Variable rule analysis further shows that different factors (such as copula verb, lexical item and modification within the NP) play a role for article use, but they do so in varying degrees for different lexical items. A construction grammar account is used to explain how single role predicate construals can be extended to nouns like teacher and father.
Hundt, Marianne