ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to evaluate the evidence for the idea that the DP is divided into three layers, SDP, PDP and KIP, in a more systematic fashion. The facts that I will bring to bear on this issue are predicate coordination, the semantics of possessives in English, ne extraction in Italian and the ability of WH-quantifiers to appear after determiners. The next step will be to sort out which elements can appear at each level. The technique that I use relies on the working hypothesis that Italian has a different pronoun for each layer; looking at the possibility of coindexing various types of phrases and each pronoun we derive the category of the phrase under consideration. Returning to pivotal raising, a principle will be proposed, linking the possibility of an element YP to appear in [Spec, XP] to the fact that Y and X share certain features (e.g. 'predicative,' 'referential,' but also 'quantificational'). This principle explains the extraction pattern and the agreement pattern of the kind-construction, as well as why some pivotal-"of" structures are necessarily predicative.
