ИСТИНА

The systems of articles in modern Irish and Icelandic are distinguished by the fact that in these languages it is the category of definiteness only that receives grammatical expression, the indefinite article being not present. Consequently, if the speaker does not want to mark definiteness, the noun is used without any article, whereas if it is necessary to emphasise indefiniteness, certain lexical means, such as indefinite pronouns, should be added (cf. Ir. éicint, ar bith; Ice. nokkur, somur). This paper presents some preliminary results and findings based on the contrastive analysis of the definite article use in modern Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Icelandic Gospel translations. During the research, when approximately 1000 contexts were singled out and compared, it turned out that most of the examples were characterised by the similar use of article. In 228 examples, however, article distribution appeared to be drastically different, despite of the existing similarities in the systems of the given languages, and it is these cases that present special linguistic interest and worth investigating. Interestingly enough, the moment we turn to the concrete examples of discrepancy, it appears that most of them can be schematically described as following: Ir. ART Gael. ART Ice. –ART, which means that Irish or Scottish Gaelic speakers tend to use articles more often than the speakers of Modern Icelandic. Furthermore, in quite a number of cases the definite article is used even at the first mention of a person or an object when the latter is considered to be new information for the reader.