ABSTRACT
The remainder of this study is broken down as follows. Chapter 6 highlights relevant aspects of the theory of functional categories and reviews the major results achieved in a number of earlier studies which applied the DP Hypothesis to (aspects of) the syntax of nominal phrases in English, German and Hebrew, and which assumed the framework of the theory of Government and Binding. Section 6.1 brings up certain facts concerning the Romanian Case and Determiner systems and points to their implications for the theory of functional categories; a feature of some importance, which will play a central role in our subsequent explorations, is that -L, which does not need to function as D at the level of syntax in order to be able to assign GEN Case (as noted above), does need to be a syntactic determiner in order to serve as host to morphological Case. Sections 6.2-6.5 explore the relevance to the DP Hypothesis of the distribution of GEN phrases in Romanian, by investigating the (im)possibility of cooccurrence of such phrases with the enclitic morpheme -L when the latter is hosted by Nouns, Prepositions, Adjectives and Determiners respectively. Throughout sections 6.1-6.5, the Government and Binding framework is assumed, primarily for expository purposes. Chapter 7 investigates the theoretical analyses that the two theoretical frameworks mentioned above make available in respect to certain phenomena that concern genitive phrases and their licensing elements in Romanian and in the other three languages discussed in Chapter 6. The phenomena in question are (i) the manner in which -L and comparable elements in other languages combine with their hosts; (ii) cross-linguistic contrasts in the linear order of ‘possessor’ DPs and ‘possessed’ Ns; and (iii) adjacency effects involving ‘possessor’ phrases and adnominal APs. Section 7.3 summarizes the results of the chapter.
