Teamleader:
Tarald Taraldsen

Other Team members:
Madeleine Halmøy
5 graduate students

Time span:
Project starts:
01.08.2004

Project ends:
31.07.2007

Brief description and goals:
Using the term “noun phrase” in a broad sense ranging from small, apparently determiner-less phrases (“bare” NPs) to what is now usually called DP (possibly a family of different phrase-types) or QP, we see the main purpose of this subproject in the establishment of a hierarchy of functional categories for noun phrases on the basis of comparative study. Much previous work in this area has focused on the order of adjectival modifiers, taken to reflect an underlying hierarchy of functional heads (hosting adjectives in their Spec’s), in a way reminiscent of (and antedating) Cinque’s work on adverbs. We want to add a systematic, cross-linguistic investigation of functional elements like classifiers, number markers, agreement markers, case and different types of determiners (including quantifiers). We want to know both what the DP-internal functional hierarchy looks like (if indeed there is one with cross-linguistic validity), and if phrases at different levels of the hierarchy appear in different positions inside clauses (assuming that higher levels of nominal projections can be omitted). The ultimate goal is to verify the hypothesis that the functional structure of noun phrases is strongly parallel to clausal functional structure.

Specific research tasks worth mentioning at this stage include looking at the relationship between classifiers, number marking and determiners, the relationship between pronominal elements and subconstituents of noun phrases, Case-assignment/ agreement patterns in noun phrases (in particular, the morphosyntax of possession) and nominalizations.

We will base the research on typologically representative language samples and draw as much as possible on collaboration with other institutions (e.g. the Stellenbosch group for Bantu-style classifier systems). This initial stage of the project is scheduled to stretch out over the first two years of the project, allowing MPhil students entering the program in the fall of 2004 to complete master’s theses within the framework of the project.
Starting from the second year of the project we will initiate a systematic comparison between the functional structure of noun phrases and clausal functional structure. This work will run in parallel with the continuation of the first phase, and is intended to draw on results coming out of the clausal architecture project. It will also provide a new set of thesis topics for master’s students who decide not to concentrate exclusively on the internal structure of noun phrases. This second stage is also scheduled to stretch out over two academic years.

The last stage of the program will use the results obtained in the previous stages to explore a specific hypothesis concerning extraction of noun phrases from clauses. This hypothesis is based on the assumption that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the nominal functional hierarchy and the clausal one, such that it makes sense to talk about a noun phrase as being bigger (or smaller) than a given clause in terms of how large a portion of the shared functional structure it contains, and says that extraction is limited to “bigger out of smaller”. Work on this part of the project will start out in the third year of the project (and run in parallel with the final year of the second stage), and will hopefully merge into a general project on displacement and/or locality after that.

Activities planned for the project:
The project group will in general meet once a week. In the initial phase these meetings will have the format of a reading group to introduce the team members to the topics we will work on.

Potential external collaborators: