A basic assumption within truth-conditional semantics is that we use language to talk about the way the world is (or should be). Establishing reference is consequently seen as one of the basic functions of language. And articles - the basic tools to establish reference - have acquired a fundamental position in the semantics literature. Research in article semantics has however restricted itself to definite and indefinite articles and has largely ignored possessives like my, your, & In this project, I (i) argue that possessives should be included in the article paradigm, (ii) show how this insight adds a whole new dimension to ten years of article acquisition research and (iii) bring together semanticists, L2 acquisition researchers and language teachers as well as their research methodologies to come up with a new state of the art view on article semantics. In part 1 I work out an article semantics of possessives, study their cross-linguistic variation and end up with a typology of possessives. Part 2 is devoted to the predictions this new typology makes for the L2 acquisition of articles. These predictions are tested both experimentally and on learner corpora (electronic collections of texts produced by L2 learners). Part 3 builds towards the new state of the art view on articles by bringing together the theory-driven research of part 1 and 2 with error-driven analyses of learner corpora inspired by those of language teachers. Next to publications in international linguistics journals and workshops aimed at semanticists and L2 acquisition researchers, the project will make its results as well as the theoretical insights of three decades of article research available through a tri-lingual (Dutch-French-English) website aimed at language teachers that will be launched during its closing symposium.