Abstract
This paper presents a comparative analysis of the article generalization process in nominal phrases with human relational nouns in Galician and European Portuguese. After reviewing literature proposing various explanations of the advance of the article in structures with possessives in general, and with kinship names more specifically, the approach of Labrousse (2020) is adopted to study this phenomenon in European Portuguese. Data for this analysis are provided by the TILG corpus of contemporary Galician. Based on observations of the behavior of these structures in Galician, conclusions are drawn about the relevance of variables connected to syntactic function (prepositional versus non-prepositional), number, gender, person and type of relationship. The comparison of the data from European Portuguese and Galician shows that the article generalization process is earlier and older in the former language.