(La) Argentina y sus nombres

Abstract

The general incompatibility of the article before the name derives from its refer-ential and grammatical properties. However, in some dialectal and sociolectal-varieties of Spanishthe presence of an expletive article is frequent with personal and place names. As for the name of Argentina, the use of the article has been explainedand prescribed by the Argentine Academy of Letters based on a gram-matical argument, the ellipsis. The purpose of this paper is to review this argu-ment, understand their rationale and propose an alternative, already suggested by R.J. Cuervo.