On English DP

This thesis focuses on the structure of the phrase which has, as its lexical core, a nominal element, rather than a verb. It is argued that, just as the verb in a clause is surmounted by a series of functional projections, so is the noun. These functional projections in both cases add non-0-related semantics and have the syntactic effect of providing positions for both heads and phrases. It is illustrated that the true head of a nominal phrase is a functional category, which is the topmost of a series of functional categories, just as T or I is the topmost of a series of functional categories in the clause. More specifically, it can be seen that the topmost functional category in the nominal phrase is that which is usually in English, filled by a determiner. This means that noun phrases are really determiner phrases and that they have the following kind of structure:Here DP stands for a phrase headed by an element of category D. The thesis discusses the fact that in this maximal projection DP, D is the...