The genesis of the French article un

On the basis of texts from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, this paper s traces the different stages of the evolution of the form stemming from th e Latin numeral unus, before it became part of the system of the French art icles. It particularly takes into account those texts which allow us to com pare different stages of the language, such as the reworkings in Middle Fre nch of texts in Old French, as well as successive versions of the same Lati n text. The description of this evolution, in terms of a grammaticalization process, shows the differences between the initial stages and later ones. The articles uns in Old French is the result of a process of semantic enric hment: a new textual role, the introduction of a new referent in the text, has been superimposed on its ancient numeral meaning. From Middle French on , the article un undergoes a process of semantic weakening, which is condit ioned by the process of integration into the paradigm of the articles; on t he one hand, the idea of the "countable singular", which will bring the art icle un into contrast with the articles du and des, develops out of the num eral meaning; on the other hand, as opposed to the article le, the textual function is redefined as absence an anaphoric link. The article also looks into the plural forms of the article un, which have disappeared in the Midd le French period. It is shown that the cause of the disappearance of these plural forms is not semantic but poetic.