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NP-internal agreement and the structure of the noun phrase

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 March 2006

FRANK VAN EYNDE
Affiliation:
University of Leuven

Abstract

For the analysis of the noun phrase, the treatment which currently prevails in generative grammar is the one in which the head of the noun phrase is identified with the determiner, rather than with the noun. This D(et)P treatment has the advantage of providing a uniform account of all syntactic categories, both the substantive and the functional ones, and it provides a natural way to capture the co-occurrence restrictions between nouns and determiners, but it also faces a number of empirical problems. To solve them I propose an analysis in which the head of the noun phrase is identified with the noun, but in which the advantages of the DP treatment are incorporated as much as possible. This is done in two steps. First, I argue that the requirement (or the desirability) of a uniform treatment of all syntactic categories does not by itself favour the DP treatment, since there is no empirical evidence for the postulation of a separate syntactic category for the determiners. The argumentation is mainly based on an analysis of NP-internal agreement data and leads to the conclusion that the class of determiners is syntactically heterogeneous: there are the adjectival determiners, which are subject to morpho-syntactic agreement, and (pro)nominal ones, which are exempt from this agreement. Second, I dissociate the roles of head and selector. All prenominals, both the specifying and the modifying ones, are treated as functors which select a nominal head, rather than as heads which select a nominal complement. This functor treatment accounts in a natural and straightforward way for both morpho-syntactic agreement and semantic types of agreement. The language which is used for exemplification is Dutch, but at various points comparisons are made with German and English.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
2006 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This text is based on work which was presented at the 9th International HPSG Conference in Seoul (August 2002), the 13th CLIN Meeting in Groningen (November 2002), the 10th International HPSG Conference in East Lansing (July 2003) and the SCAN-Matrix workshop in Göteborg (October 2004). I would like to thank the reviewers of the abstracts and the respective audiences for their comments and remarks. Special thanks are due to Ivan Sag, Lars Hellan, Gosse Bouma, Valerio Allegranza, Ineke Schuurman, Vincent Vandeghinste and the anonymous referees of the Journal of Linguistics for their comments on previous versions of this text.