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In order to capture the parallel, he extended the arguments made by a number of scholars (see Szabolcsi, 1983/84) and proposed that DP is the maximal category projected by the class of determiners. In DP, the determiner (D) is a functional head that selects a NP as its complement just as an auxiliary, instead of a verb, is the head of an IP. In other words, while an inflection (INFL) selects the VP, a D selects the NP. DP is the functional superstructure of the NP just like IP, which is the functional superstructure of the VP. Abney’s proposal is known as the DP hypothesis, which contributes to drawing a parallelism between the syntactic structure of noun phrases and that of the sentence. The DP structure can be tree-diagramed as the following:
With this new position, articles, serving as the head of DP instead of the specifier of NP, have gained a new status in grammar. Whether or not articles and their features can be accessible to L2 learners has become a new focus in studies of second language acquisition. Thus, the study of the acquisition of articles, to a certain extent, has taken on greater importance than earlier studies.