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This article justifies Abney’s DP Hypothesis from a point of view internal to Basque grammar. The author reviews Abney’s arguments and adapts them to Basque, devoting special attention to proper names and personal pronouns. Two separate sections discuss (a) the relevance of the NP/DP distinction in three constructions (vocatives, complex predicates and predicate nominals), and (b) the language internal evidence for further functional projections (Q and Num), based on quantification data and DP-internal number agreement. Finally, the author proposes that doubly determined noun phrases with initial demonstratives (only found in Western Basque) should be analyzed in the light of the DP Hypothesis.

This article proposes that Basque genitive case can be checked in two positions: one in bare NPs, and the other in the specifier of Poss, a projection below DP and higher than QP. The first genitive resembles Chomsky’s (1986) inherent genitive case and is restricted to object genitives. The genitive in [spec, Poss] is structural and both subject and object genitives can move to this high position together, thus creating a multiple specifier configuration. As a result, the derived order SO(Q)N displays both superiority and Person Case Constraint effects.