Minimal Inquiries and the Acquisition of the Definite Article in Modern Greek

The acquisition of definite articles has often been related to the acquisition of functional categories (see e.g. Radford, 1990; Clahsen, 1996; Penner & Weissenborn, 1996), since definite articles belong to the functional category (FC) D. Under this view, a problem that remains unsolved is why children pass through a stage in which they produce some definite articles, while at the same time there is a significant rate of definite article omission. If lack of definite articles reflects lack of FCs, the eventual presence of FCs should preclude definite article omission. In this paper, making use of minimalist ideas concerning the feature specification of nouns and adopting Chierchia's Nominal Mapping Parameter (Chierchia, 1998), I will discuss the acquisition of definite articles in Modern Greek (MG) from a rather different perspective, one which is based on the idea that the syntax-semantics mapping in the nominal system is not cross-linguistically uniform. Total and partial omission of definite articles does not pose a problem for this analysis. In contrast, this model predicts that children learning Germanic, Romance languages and MG will pass through a stage of optional use of definite articles.