Why Rose is the Rose : On the use of definite articles in proper names

The goal of this paper is to examine the use of definite articleswith proper names, both cross-linguistically and intra-linguistically and provide a morpho-syntactic analysis of it. The first question to consider is whether article absence or article presence is the default case. The second question is when and how the alternative arises. I will presuppose here that names in argument positions are definite descriptions (see Geurts 1997, Elbourne 2002, and Matushansky 2005a,b, to appear) and summarize some arguments in favor of this view. As a result, the default is instantiated by languages that do have definite articles with proper names in argument positions: