Determiner phrase in a language without determiners (with apologies to Jim Huang 1982)

Abstract

Serbo-Croatian (SC) is a language without articles, probably the only category of speech that has uncontroversially and crosslinguistically been argued to occupy the head of the Determiner Phrase (DP). This paper argues that even SC, a language without articles, projects a DP on top of NPs in argument positions. The strongest evidence comes from noun/pronoun asymmetries, where the pronouns precede, and nouns follow, certain intensifying adjectives. Assuming that these adjectives occupy a fixed syntactic position, the conclusion must be that pronouns occupy a structurally higher position than nouns. Since the evidence of such asymmetries is extremely sparse in the data, the children presumably cannot rely on them to conclude that there is a DP in SC. Since there are also no articles in SC, children have virtually no evidence of the existence of a DP. It must be then that the projection of DPs is a universal property, independent of the presence of the lexical item which solely occupies the head of the projection. Morphological properties of SC pronouns and adjectives actually support the existence of more than just one functional projection in the noun phrase in SC. The paper derives Greenberg's universal 43, which states that pronouns are more likely to have (gender) morphology than nouns, by arguing that pronouns move (overtly) through more functional projections than nouns, and ultimately land in D.

Nothing to agree on: Non-agreeing subjects of copular clauses in Hebrew

“…Under the featureless-DP implementation, this fits directly into the long tradition of identifying the DP layer with argumenthood; see e.g. Chierchia (1998);Longobardi (1994);Pereltsvaig (2007); Progovac (1998) and many others. What this means is that the subject of a ze-clause must be interpreted non-argumentally (see also Pereltsvaig 2006, who similarly claims that non-agreeing subjects in Russian and Norwegian are non-referential).…”

Long adjectival inflection and specificity in Serbo-Croatian

“…among others Cinque 1994, Scott 1998Leko 1998 andProgovac 1998 for Serbo-Croatian), and (ii) APs adjoin to a maximal projection in the noun phrase (cf. among others Bernstein 1993, Bosque & Picallo 1996, Bouchard 1998, Stavrou 1996, Valois 1991Zlatic 1997 for Serbo-Croatian).…”

Of good thieves and old friends: An analysis of Croatian adjectival forms

“…In the Croatian Grammar edited by Silić and Pranjković (2007, 134) From the examples in (51) we can see that there is some parallelism with definiteness in English. This is confirmed in Progovac (1998), who declares that this link of Croatian adjectives to definiteness often corresponds to how definite articles are used in English.…”

“…He also states that not all adjectives are able to make the definite/indefinite distinction but that only descriptive adjectives make this distinction (p.233). Progovac (1998) agrees that a contrast in definiteness is marked through the distinction of the two forms. Marković (2002) also claims that definiteness in Croatian is expressed through the adjectival paradigm, even though it is a nominal characteristic and therefore nouns with no adjectives are overtly underspecified for definiteness.…”