This volume grew out of our research agenda, seeking to understand the structure and interpretation of bare nouns in three typologically and genetically unrelated articleless languages: Lithuanian, Inuktitut, and Innu-aimun. None of these languages has articles, and yet they are very different from one another with respect to the syntactic and semantic behaviour of their bare nouns (for Lithuanian, see Gillon and Armoskaite 2013, 2015; for Lithuanian and Innu-aimun, Gillon and Armoskaite 2012; for Inuktitut, Lithuanian and Innu-aimun, Gillon 2013, 2015). This variation forced us to question the universality of D, as well as the universality of the semantics of D.

This paper assumes that the basic denotation of nouns can be that of kind or property and that the determiner system of a language is a direct consequence of this cross-linguistic variation. An analysis of how definiteness and specificity are marked across three languages with different determiner systems, namely, English, French and Mauritian Creole (MC), provides evidence of the co-relation between noun denotation and determiner system. Languages with kind denoting nouns (English and MC) admit bare nominal arguments, which are barred in French, whose nouns denote properties. However, English and MC differ in that English has an overt definite article, which is a lacking in MC. This null element requires licensing by an overt specificity marker in some syntactic environments. The English and MC definite articles are analyzed as operators that quantify over sets of kind denoting nouns, and they serve a different function from the French definite article, which is specified for number and selects properties.

In this paper, we reconsider whether article-less languages have the DP projection, focusing on Tatar. We argue that putative correlations between the presence/absence of articles in a language and various DP-external phenomena (e.g. Left-Branch Extraction, superiority effects, and others), discussed by Bošković and Şener (2014), inter alia, do not hold if a broader range of languages is considered more carefully. Instead, we show that certain correlations obtain between the internal structure, syntactic position, case marking, and interpretation of. noun phrases found in distinct structural environments: direct objects, possessors, and complements of the so-called attributivizers. Specifically, we demonstrate a contrast between two types of nominals: accusative direct objects, possessors in ezafe-3, and complements of certain attributivizers share properties that contrast them with unmarked direct objects, possessors in ezafe-2, and complements of other attributivizers. We argue that postulating the DP projection in the former but not the latter type of noun phrases allows us to account for these observed correlations in a unified way.

Evidence for a DP-projection in West Greenlandic Inuit Abstract The goal of this paper is to argue in favor of a DP-layer in West Greenlandic Inuit noun phrases and in doing so contribute to the argument that the absence of overt D-elements is not directly indicative of the absence of a DP-layer. Inuit is a polysynthetic, ergative language with no overt articles; for this reason it has been argued that a D-head is unnecessary. Others have argued contrastively that a functional projection KP (Case) is necessary (often assuming DP). This paper differs from both camps in the sense that it considers syntactic features specific to D. I present three primary arguments in support of a D-head in West Greenlandic: (i) the D-head acts as the locus of agreement features in possessive DPs, (ii) the D-head is the locus of the syntactic/semantic feature of definiteness; and (iii) a DP-layer is needed to provide a landing site for movement in DP-internal word order variations.

This paper considers the syntactic and semantic properties of two vocabulary items in Tagalog, ang and ng. It is shown that although ang and ng appear to encode definiteness (via familiarity), they are in fact unmarked for definiteness, being compatible with both familiar and novel readings. Crucial data from modification by weak quantifiers are presented in favour of this description. The default interpretation of ang and ng as familiar and novel, respectively, arises due to their syntactic position (subject versus object). Given that ang and ng mark case, it is argued that they are case markers in K° and not determiners.

This paper investigates the place of Vietnamese in the binary NP/DP typology as formulated by Bošković (2005, 2008, 2009, 2010). Vietnamese patterns with NP languages when it comes to its lack of a genuine definite determiner, the presence of radical pro-drop, and its lack of number morphology, but it patterns with DP languages when it comes to the presence of TP, subject expletives, and subject-object extraction asymmetries. The mixed status of Vietnamese suggests that the difference between article and article-less languages might not be as straightforward or clearcut as Bošković claims. In fact, the way these properties pattern in Vietnamese reveals that there are at least three smaller parameters (nominal, clausal, and quantificational) at stake, not just the presence or absence of DP, and that these three are independently fixed as [-DP], [+TP], and [-movement], respectively. Also important is the fact that Vietnamese is a topic-prominent language.

This paper investigates adverb extraction out of traditional adjective phrases (TAPs) like “extremely expensive”, in a number of Slavic, Romance, and Germanic languages, and establishes two novel generalizations regarding such extraction out of predicative and attributive TAPs, also showing what the (un)availability of such extraction reveals about the structure of TAPs cross-linguistically and in different constructions in a single language. I argue that attributive TAPs are never bare APs in languages that use only one adjectival form attributively. Languages that use two adjectival forms in the attributive position allow adverb extraction out of predicative and attributive TAPs, which indicates that adverb extraction is possible only if a bare AP is used in this position. More generally, I argue that extended projections of different lexical categories tend to be uniform within a language with respect to how much structure they project.