When the indefinite article implies uniqueness. A case study from Old Italian

The article investigates some diachronic aspects of the morpho-syntactic marking of indefiniteness, by focusing on a case study from Old Italian on the use of the indefinite article with a possessive and a kinship term implying a unique referent, as in una sua madre, literally ‘*a his/her mother’, that is, ‘a mother of his/ hers’. Using a corpus-based analysis of Old Italian texts, I will show how the function of the indefinite article in this kind of noun phrase may be accounted for if the notion of discourse prominence is taken into account. I further suggest that this quite peculiar use presupposes the same semantic–pragmatic reasons which determine the distribution of uno as a non-obligatory marker of indefiniteness, and its alternation with zero.