Serbo-Croatian (SC) is a language without articles, probably the
only category of
speech that has uncontroversially and crosslinguistically been argued to
occupy the
head of the Determiner Phrase (DP). This paper argues that even SC, a language
without articles, projects a DP on top of NPs in argument positions. The
strongest
evidence comes from noun/pronoun asymmetries, where the pronouns precede,
and
nouns follow, certain intensifying adjectives. Assuming that these adjectives
occupy
a fixed syntactic position, the conclusion must be that pronouns occupy
a structurally
higher position than nouns. Since the evidence of such asymmetries is extremely
sparse in the data, the children presumably cannot rely on them to conclude
that there
is a DP in SC. Since there are also no articles in SC, children have virtually
no
evidence of the existence of a DP. It must be then that the projection
of DPs is a
universal property, independent of the presence of the lexical item which
solely
occupies the head of the projection. Morphological properties of SC pronouns
and
adjectives actually support the existence of more than just one functional
projection
in the noun phrase in SC. The paper derives Greenberg's universal
43, which states
that pronouns are more likely to have (gender) morphology than nouns, by
arguing
that pronouns move (overtly) through more functional projections than nouns,
and
ultimately land in D.