The grammaticalization of personal articles in Ibero-Romance, in general, and in Catalan, in particular, is discussed in this contribution. The personal articles proceed historically from the Latin noun dominus / domina ‘lord, master / lady, madam’, used for society’s upper class, and appear nowadays only with [+human] proper names. Firstly, it developed into an honorific marker in Old Ibero-Romance, and in modern Catalan into a generic personal article without honorific meaning. Their evolution is conceived as a cyclic change, whereby phrasal (adjectival) elements occupying specifier positions first develop into X° heads, and eventually into (clitic) affixes in the form of articles, while the Old Ibero-Romance honorifics are XPs (and not heads). This cyclic change comprises phonological, morphological, syntactic, and also semantic shifts.

1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Dame DAME (through the Fr. from Lat. domina, mistress, lady, the feminine of dominus, master, lord), properly a name of respect or a title equivalent to “lady,” now surviving in English as the legal designation of the wife or widow of a baronet or knight and prefixed to the Christian name and surname. It has also been used in modern times by certain societies or orders, e.g. the Primrose League, as the name of a certain rank among the lady members, answering to the male rank of knight. The ordinary use of the word by itself is for an old woman. As meaning “mistress,” i.e. teacher, “dame” was used of the female keepers of schools for young children, which have become obsolete since the advance of public elementary education. At Eton College boarding-houses kept by persons other than members of the teaching staff of the school were known as “Dames’ Houses,” though the head might not necessarily be a lady. As a term of address to ladies of all ranks, from the sovereign down, “madam,” shortened to “ma’am,” represents the French madame, my lady.

Abstract Unlike Latin, Modern Romance languages have developed definite and, later, indefinite articles. The ancestor of the Romance definite article (= DA) is the Latin weak demonstrative ille, with few exceptions, like Sardinian. With demonstratives, the referent of the phrase (this/that book) is the unique object which is close or away from the deictic center (usually the speaker) and satisfies the property expressed by the N(P). In contrast, with the DA, proximity or distance from the deictic center plays no role: the referent of the definite phrase (the book) is the unique object which satisfies the nominal property with respect to some situation. According to Greenberg’s Grammaticalization Cycle, Romance articles are in the first stage, since there holds a sharp opposition between definite and indefinite phrases, and if a nominal denotes a situationally unique referent, the use of the DA is obligatory for all types of nouns. A further mark of grammaticalization is that the DA is sometimes required even when it plays no semantic role—for instance, when the nominal has unique reference, as in the case of proper names. Yet Romance languages also provide examples of proprial/personal Articles on proper names, systematically used in some languages (Spoken Portuguese, Balearic Catalan) and also used across Romance, in informal contexts, where they introduce an inference of familiarity with the referent. The existence of expletive articles in Romance, unlike English, is eviden