Syntactic theory and Ancient Greek. Remarks on the development of the article-system.

The purpose of this paper is twofold:
1. Description of syntactic patterns in ‘ancient’ varieties. By means of the implementation of the theoretical tools provided by formal syntax (with special reference to the framework of Principles&Parameters, stemming from Chomsky 1981, and to the theories on diachronic variation recently developed in the generative framework, e.g. Roberts&Roussou 2003, Roberts 2007), I will investigate a number of syntactic properties of nominal structures in Ancient Greek, showing that they fall within well-known crosslinguistic patterns, and that they obey the same constraints (including those on word order) which act on ‘modern’ languages (Manolessou 2000, Guardiano 2003, Bakker 2009).
2. Analysis of diachronic change. Focusing on a number of (long-studied) phenomena, I will prompt minimal comparisons between successive diachronic stages, describing the development of the article-system as consisting of a series of successive micro-changes (formally represented as ‘parameter resettings’) affecting the representation of particular features in the main functional category of nominal structures: D.