09 Philosophisch-historische Fakultät
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://elib.uni-stuttgart.de/handle/11682/10
Browse
Item Open Access The syntax of nominal expressions in articleless languages : a split DP-analysis of Croatian nouns(2012) Caruso, Durdica Zeljka; Alexiadou, Artemis (Prof. Dr.)The aim of this dissertation is to investigate the internal structure of nominal expressions in Croatian, which regularly appear without articles, and to provide a syntactic analysis of them. Articles have long been regarded as the most prominent instantiation of the D-head. Since Croatian does not have definite and indefinite articles, the principal question is whether articleless nominal expressions project a DP on top of NP, and, if so, which elements qualify as possible D-heads. In order to elaborate on this issue, I critically question some of the arguments provided in support of the NP approach and examine certain syntactic structures and patterns that provide clues to the syntactic make-up of Croatian nominal expressions. In concrete terms, I reconsider the syntactic status of all prenominal elements (adjectives vs. determiners), including their external merge position, and discuss their prenominal neutral word order. I consider the optionality-status of demonstrative pronouns, along with other (in)definiteness markers, and deal with the question how and to what extent they contribute to the (in)definite interpretation of Croatian noun phrases. I also examine adjectival premodification in coordinated NP-structures, structural alternations in genitive constructions and the internal structure of argument-supporting nominalizations (ASNs). Their discussion provides a more in-depth insight into the syntactic structure of Croatian nominal expressions and shows that these constructions cannot be explained either by the NP-analysis or the proposed DP-analyses of Slavic noun phrases, according to which all prenominal elements are treated as adjectival modifiers that are either adjoined to NP (NP approach) or occupy specifier positions of their dedicated functional projections (DP approach). Following the idea that the interpretation of nouns is conceptually equal across languages, irrespective of the presence or absence of certain morpho-syntactic markers (in this case articles), I adopt a split DP-structure for Croatian nouns and provide their analysis in terms of a split DP. The splitting of the nominal left periphery into various functional projections, such as DefP, FocP or TopP, allows me to explain various syntactic phenomena within the Croatian noun phrase.