Parametric Changes in the History of the Greek Article

In this paper I argue that meaningful explanations of syntactic change may be in fact attained by assuming both a solid theory of synchronic description and a strong hypothesis on diachronic variation, able to lead different and apparently unrelated phenomena back to a unique evolutionary development.The theoretical framework is based on the recent proposals on the potential historical impact of the generative theory of syntactic parameters, i.e. the assumption that formal syntactic analysis may be in principle used as a source of diachronic and evolutionary explanation (Longobardi & Guardiano 2008).The empirical analysis is focused on the development of the Greek article-system; more specifically, a comparative parametric description of data belonging to the Classical period, to New-Testament varieties, and to standard Modern Greek is proposed, and two specific events, i.e. the rise of the so-called indefinite article and the necessity for the (expletive) definite one to occur with proper names (in Modern Greek), are investigated and explained as the diachronic consequence of a single parameter resetting.