Speakers of York English (UK) use a zero article with definite singular nouns (e.g., “They used to follow Ø river”), which is impossible in Standard English. We probe the possibility that this form is a remnant from Old English, when there were no articles as they are currently found in Modern English, rather than a more contemporary development. We trace the diachronic trajectory of the zero article in historical-descriptive grammars and test social and linguistic constraints on its use in York English in a logistic regression analysis. The results show that information structure is a significant predictor of the zero article across all generations of the community and that the zero article is used in the same way as it was used as far back as Old English. However, it exhibits heightened usage among the older and younger generations, exhibiting a U-shaped curve. We suggest that this pattern demonstrates longitudinal maintenance of a conservative feature, which is suppressed in middle-age as the result of social pressures. In this way, this case study adds insight into the fate of dialect features in contemporary speech communities. It also highlights the importance of combining insights from different strands in linguistics for understanding the evolution of syntactic variants like the zero article.

中文翻译：

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“他们曾经跟随Ø河”：约克英语零文章

约克英语（英国）的演讲者使用带有单数名词的零冠词（例如，“他们曾经跟随 Ø 河”），这在标准英语中是不可能的。我们探讨了这种形式是古英语的残余的可能性，当时没有现代英语中的文章，而不是更现代的发展。我们在历史描述语法中追踪零冠词的历时轨迹，并在逻辑回归分析中测试其在约克英语中的使用的社会和语言约束。结果表明，信息结构是社区所有代中零文章的重要预测因子，并且零文章的使用方式与早在古英语中的使用方式相同。然而，它在老一代和年轻一代中表现出更高的使用率，呈现U形曲线。我们认为这种模式表明保守特征的纵向维持，由于社会压力，这种特征在中年受到抑制。通过这种方式，本案例研究增加了对当代语音社区方言特征命运的洞察。它还强调了将语言学中不同方面的见解结合起来以理解句法变体（如零冠词）演变的重要性。