Formal Theories and the Analysis of Ancient Languages: Definite Articles in Ancient Greek.

Topic and goals. This paper focuses on a synchronic description of some properties displayed by the so-called definite article in two (groups of) Ancient Greek varieties (Classical and Koinè Greek and Homeric Greek), and suggests a preliminary diachronic analysis of the mechanisms and the minimal changes which gave rise to the current structure of the article-system in Greek. The research. This paper is part of an on-going broader research on the syntactic properties of nominal structures in Greek, whose main aim is to show that the exploration of such properties in the ancient stages of the language, as well as of their diachronic development, can be effectively supported by the tools provided by formal theories of syntax. The research grounds on two main foci. 1. Description of syntactic patterns in ‘ancient’ varieties. The implementation of the theoretical tools provided by formal syntax shows that the behavior of nominal structures in Ancient Greek falls within well-established crosslinguistic patterns, and obeys the same constraints acting on ‘modern’ languages (Manolessou 2000, Guardiano 2003, 2006, 2011a/b, 2013). 2. Analysis of diachronic change. Minimal comparisons suggest that the main changes in the DP-structure visible across the history of Greek stem from a series of successive micro-changes formally representable as ‘parameter resettings’, which can be traced back precisely through a systematic synchronic analysis of sequential varieties.