The history of Greek articles: a syntactic approach

This chapter proposes a description of some syntactic properties of the definite article (ὁ, ἡ, τό) in Ancient Greek. The framework adopted is based on formal approaches to crosslinguistic variation and on the dp-hypothesis. Three syntactic contexts are explored: argument nominals where ὁ, ἡ, τό is required, argument nominals where ὁ, ἡ, τό is ungrammatical, and argument nominals where ὁ, ἡ, τό can either be visible or omitted. It will be shown that, with rare exceptions, the distribution of ὁ, ἡ, τό in argument nominal structures in Classical and post-Classical Greek is coherent with the constraints which define cross linguistic variation in this domain