All non-head material must be phrasal. This is a theoretical rather than an empirical argument! (1) *the that book Determiners dont seem to be phrasal. Determiners are HEADS. There can only be one of them in an NP (not true cross-linguistically). If there can be only one head within a phrase and all other material is supposed to be phrasal, then we face a problem here!! Possible solution: determiner is not inside the NP, but it heads its own phrasal projection (Abney 1987).
5 (2) Old view DP Hypothesis N’ O. k. This is a theory… What about the empirical evidence?
Is there any? 6 (I) Distributional properties of determiners (e. g. the behaviour of genitive (possessive) NPs) Free genitive (of-genitive) a. the roof of the building b. the hat of the man standing over there the free genitive uses the preposition of to mark the possessive relation between the two NPs. Construct or ‘s-genitive a. the building’s roof b. [the man standing over there]’s hat c.
* [the man]’s standing over there hat ‘s is not a suffix! It is in complementary distribution with determiners: 7 there’s the hat (cf. the hat of the man standing over there)
Unlike the of-genitive, the ‘s-genitive doesnt allow both nouns to have a determiner. Determiners like ‘s and the are instances of the same thing! DP possessor NPA possessed DPI DP2 hat man standing over there (carnte 2002:146) 9 According to the old view, in which determiners were specifiers of NP, there is no way to generate ‘s as a determiner and to also have the possessor NP preceding it: the man standing over there ‘s 10 (II) Movement (Longobardi 1994, 1996) a.
La mia casa © bella. the my house is beautiful b. Casa mia © bella. c. *La casa mia © bella. d. *Casa la mia © bella.
The Category Article Articles: although they lack descriptive content, they contribute to the interpretation of the DP. Articles or determiners play a role in the referential properties of the DP: the choice of the definite article in association with an N indicates that we are dealing with entities (e. g. cat on the one hand, milk on the other) which are not mentioned for the first time. The definite determiner signals that the referents of the DPs are already accessible in the discourse, we know which cat and which milk we are talking about.
By using the indefinite article in (8) we introduce a novel cat into the discourse: A cat was eating crisps under the table. 13 For some researchers the article is a grammatical category which in some languages gramaticalises the semantico- pragmatic notion of definiteness (e. g. Lyons 1999). Consider the following examples: a. The cat ran quickly after the mouse. b. Someone left the cat on my doorstep this morning. c. The cat was chosen by his wife. (10) a. A cat ran quickly after the mouse. b. Someone left a cat on my doorstep this morning. c. A cat was chosen by his wife.
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