ABSTRACT

The DP hypothesis holds that nominal phrases, which have traditionally been considered noun phrases, are in fact determiner phrases. Many linguists (e.g., Longobardi 1994) take the hypothesis to follow from Universal Grammar and argue that it must hold for all human languages. Some linguists (e.g., Chierchia 1998a; 1998b; Cheng and Sybesma 1999) reject the hypothesis to give suitable accounts of regular uses of bare nominal phrases in languages without articles (e.g., most classifier languages) but still accept restricted versions or minor modifications of the hypothesis by accepting a key assumption underlying the hypothesis: bare nominals must be exceptions to a general rule that are subject to serious constraints. This chapter argues that this assumption fails for most human languages: languages without articles (e.g., Latin, Classical Chinese, most classifier languages) regularly use bare nominals with definite or indefinite meanings, and use of bare nominals is not an exception but a rule in such languages. In doing so, the chapter examines influential analyses of nominals based on the DP hypothesis or its cousins and argues that those analyses not only ignore languages liberal on bare nominals but also give incorrect accounts of constraints on bare nominals in the very languages they focus on (e.g., Germanic and Romance languages, modern dialects of Chinese).