Part of
Continuity and Change in GrammarEdited by Anne Breitbarth, Christopher Lucas, Sheila Watts and David Willis
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 159] 2010
► pp. 201–224
This chapter studies the evolution of the article in Spanish within the framework of the parametric approach to language (Chomsky 1999, 2000). Based on the chronology of the extension of the definite article in different syntactic contexts in its history, the chapter extends the diachronic analysis of the structure of the Spanish DP (Ishikawa 2001) attributing the (crucial) difference among the older and modern D-systems to the difference in the phase level. The chapter concludes by discussing implications of the pattern of syntactic change suggested here for the feature-driven approach to language history.