I have argued that definiteness is a morphosyntactic category, grammaticalizing a pragmatic category of identifiability. With this in mind, we will now consider the representation of definiteness in syntax. This means discussing recent developments in the theory of phrase structure according to which definite and indefinite determiners do not, as traditionally assumed, modify nouns, but rather themselves head noun phrases. This view, the DP hypothesis, is part of a more general theory of “functional heads”, and I shall in fact argue that the category of definiteness is itself such a functional head. Almost all current work on the noun phrase assumes the DP analysis, but since much still important less recent work on definiteness is cast within the NP analysis, I begin by examining the syntactic representation of definiteness in this older framework.

Other questions to be considered along the way include: What is the category status of articles and other determiners? Are there constraints on the positions in which definite determiners may occur in the noun phrase? Are certain determiners, including definite articles, specified in the lexicon as [+ Def], or does definiteness arise in a noun phrase in some other way? How can the range of article types occurring in languages be accounted for? How does the analysis of definite pronouns relate to that of definite full noun phrases? These are fairly obvious questions arising from our earlier discussion, particularly from the comparative survey of Chapters 2 and 3. We will also look more closely at the phenomenon of nonconfigurationality, attempting to relate it to the theory of functional heads.