“…We consider the term ' proto-articles ' (Lleó, 1997(Lleó, , 2001) appropriate in order to describe them, as long as it does not imply any kind of system-wide syntactic category. These vN utterances, when neither their functions nor their forms are completely adjusted to the normative model, could be explained, as some authors have proposed, by alluding to phonological bootstrapping processes (Peters & Menn, 1993 ;Gerken, 1996 ;López-Ornat, 1997, 2003.…”