Reference and Definiteness

It has become increasingly clear since Longobardi (1994, 2003) that certain languages (e.g.Romance, but also Classical and Modern Greek, Bulgarian, Arabic (Fassi-Fehri 2003)…;henceforth 'strong D' languages) exhibit overt association of the referential content of nouns(proper names and referential generics) with D (either by overt N-to-D raising, e.g. of propernames, or by an arguably expletive article), others do not (e.g. English, but also probably therest of Germanic, Celtic…; 'weak D' languages). From a number of scattered observation itcan be suspected that a roughly analogous phenomenon arises with respect to anothersemantic property of DPs, namely definiteness: in certain constructions of some languages,but crucially not in the closely comparable constructions of others, the definite reading ofnominal arguments seems to depend on the overt association of some morphosyntacticmaterial with D (fronting to D° or SpecD).