Why not just use demonstratives instead of determiners

Question

Along the same lines as Understanding the purpose of determiners/articles/demonstratives in language, wondering why not just use demonstratives everywhere instead of determiners. It looks like the is the most popular word in English, and according to this, demonstratives are lower on the evolutionary hierarchy than determiners. In English, there are only 4 demonstratives from what I've seen, this, that, these and those. So instead of:

The person went to the store.

It would be:

This person went to that store.

Obviously the two sentences don't mean the same thing in current English, but I'm wondering what if they did. Wondering if there are any languages that just stick to determiners. That's probably what this is showing.

Wondering why the need for determiners, why didn't it just stay demonstratives.

Answer 1

I don't consider it easy to justify the distinction between demonstratives and determiners, since as far as I can tell, syntactically at least, there is none.

But your example sentences show exactly why English has all these words:

The person went to the store

It's a good sentence to use in a context where there really is one obvious candidate for "person", and one obvious candidate for "store".

This person went to that store

It's a good sentence to use in a context where there might be more than one person and/or more than one store. I'm sure you can agree that the cognitive load is (at least somewhat) higher when trying to parse this sentence.

Obviously the two sentences don't mean the same thing in current English, but I'm wondering what if they did.

If this meant the and we didn't have the word the, then some other construction would come about to fill the gap left by this. Something like this here, which would probably contract and turn into something like thisser. But this is all very speculative.

But maybe "meaning" isn't the best word to use to describe these words, since they don't refer to objects, actions or anything else. Their use is more a discourse marking tool. The distinction between a/the and this/that/these/those is useful for giving a hint:

• the person - I expect you know which one I mean

• this person and that person - I am explicitly telling you which person.

• a person - I don't expect you to know which one because this is new information to you

I pointed out that there is cognitive load associated with your second sentence above. It's efficient to reduce cognitive load, isn't it? so in the commonest case, the and a are used. And that gives the listener a lot of what s/he needs to go on.

Answer 2

In English, articles are used to mark definiteness and often number, demonstratives are used to distinguish a particular entity between multiple entities (adding deixis to definiteness and number), and both are considered determiners.

Some languages mark definiteness with articles or demonstratives, and some mark it morphologically. Some don't mark it at all.

But what makes things like definiteness useful without deixis is the same kind of thing that makes having a "generic" you useful. When information is not known, necessary, or desired, it is generally omitted. When using narrative voice, it makes more sense to use articles rather than overspecify before the frame of reference has even been established.

In English, I would argue that demonstratives add complexity and additional flexibility but articles came straight from numbers, e.g. "an" from "one", and were where we started. So we wouldn't have "stopped" at demonstratives on the way to articles. Articles didn't grow from demonstratives and provide the ability to not reference information that has not yet been provided. Demonstratives are inherently referential, and language has a need to accommodate non-referential information, by either specifying it to a lesser degree or dropping all determiners altogether.

Answer 3

I think the actual question should be phrased like this: why articles at all, why not using demonstratives when you really need to say "this person, not that one", and otherwise, just "person"?

I happen to natively speak a language which has no articles whatsoever, and never felt there's a hole in grammar. Most languages, it seems, have no definite article. When speaking and writing in English, I frequently omit the.

Now, we know PIE had no articles. However, some languages developed them, as far as I can tell, the first one was Greek, then Germanic languages. But why? How do you switch from having no need for them (and omitting them when you speak a language which has them) to having the as the most frequent word?

I think the answer is "we don't know", but it seems to be a common path in language change, and an areal one (look at the map).

WALS: definite articles