The goal of this paper is to examine the use of definite articles with 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.

Semantic accounts of the definite article have tended to fall into two general classes: ‘uniqueness ’ accounts (Russell, 1905), and ‘familiarity ’ accounts (Heim, 1982; see also Abbott, 2004, inter alia). It is also generally known that there are instances of definite descriptions that are resistant to such analyses, and are difficult to subsume under either