Chapter 5 - Determiners: Articles and Pronouns

Summary

Introduction

This chapter will discuss the semantic and syntactic behavior of the determiners. In the current generative framework, it is generally taken for granted that a determiner defines its own endocentric °projection in the structure of the noun phrase; cf. Abney (1987). It is taken to be the head of a so-called DETERMINER PHRASE (DP), which is located on top of the projection of the head noun, NP. Schematically, example (1a) can be represented in labeled bracketing as in (1b), or as the tree diagram in (1c). Recall that we use the notion of “noun phrase” in a neutral way, whereas the notions DP and NP are used to refer to the substructures marked as such in (1b&c).

• a. de blauwe auto the blue car

• b. [_DP [_D de] [_NP blauwe auto]]

The DP structure of noun phrases formally recognizes the fact that it is the determiner which is the syntactic head, and as such determines the referential/quantificational properties and the syntactic distribution of the noun phrase as a whole (apart, of course, from the semantic selection restrictions imposed by, e.g., the verb on the denotation of the head noun of its °complement).

There are two main types of determiners: articles and pronouns, which will be discussed in 5.1 and 5.2, respectively. Of course, noun phrases can also be introduced by a cardinal numeral or a quantifier like sommige ‘some’; these will not be discussed in this chapter, but in Chapter 6. Under the generally accepted assumption that a phrase has exactly one head, the claim that demonstrative and possessive pronouns are determiners, and hence occupy the D position of the DP, can be motivated by the fact that they are in complementary distribution with the articles, as well as with each other. It is impossible to simultaneously have, for instance, an article and a demonstrative pronoun in one DP. This is illustrated in (2) for combinations of two types of non-interrogative determiners; obviously, examples containing all three types of determiners are excluded as well.