This paper examines the use of the definite article with proper names designating people in Galician. In Galician there is an area where the definite article can be used with proper names and another where this does not occur (Alvarez & Xove 2002: 380; Sousa 1994). Thus some speakers produce utterances such as A Luisa veu onte (DEF.ART-Luisa came yesterday) whereas other people say Luisa veu onte (Luisa came yesterday). The paper looks at this question while seeking to contribute to the study of Galician dialect variation, still inadequately described, through comparison with what occurs in other (particularly Romance) languages. It commences with a review of the functions of the definite article and the semantic characteristics of personal names (Gary-Prieur 1994; Van Langendonck 2007), and looks at the extent of the phenomenon and its social status in other languages, especially in Romance. The next section describes the dialectal distribution of the use of the article with proper names in Galician based on two twentieth-century geolinguistic studies, Atlas Linguistico de la Peninsula lberica (ALPI) and Atlas Linguistico Galego (ALGa), in order to establish where the phenomenon occurs. In this connection, following an assessment of the usefulness of studies in linguistic geography for studying syntactic variation, it will be concluded that one must be very cautious about using the ALPI data, on account of certain methodological problems that we perceive in this atlas. As our main conclusion, we will argue that the motivation for the use of the article with proper names in Galician is a process of the article's functional expansion, also observed in other languages (Lyons 1999). In an attempt to demonstrate this hypothesis, the phenomenon is compared to the use of the article with another set of nouns, kinship terms, which share some semantic features with proper names.
