Rethinking The Syntactic Structure Of DP

In1950s-1970s, a notional word in a phrase was usually regarded as the head ingenerative grammar studies, so that the endocentricity of a phrase structure can bereflected. Noun phrase, which is one of the elementary factors of a sentence, hasbeen studied in great details by generativists who treat N as the head of a nounphrase, and its syntactic structure can be shown as follows:In1980s, it was popular to consider functional category C/I as the maximalprojection. Abney (1987) proposed DP hypothesis not only to illustrate theparallelism between a noun phrase and a sentence, but also to explain property ofEnglish gerund; according to DP hypothesis, D is the head, while N is Spec, andDP’s syntactic structure can be shown by the following tree diagram:There is no doubt that DP hypothesis has its strength when it was proposed: first,it makes the noun phrase closely parallel in its structure to the clause; second, itmakes the theory of phrase structure much more general. However, there is not onlyredundancy and insufficiency in analysis of Abney and Longobardi, but also inmodification of Lyons about DP hypothesis: DP hypothesis is insufficient, because itstheory foundations are incomplete; its derivation process is redundant, which violatesprinciple of economy; explanation is weak when it is confronted with a complicatedlanguage, such as double definiteness in Swedish and Norwegian, which violatesprinciple and parameter theory; definition of D is over generalized.Therefore, this paper aims to carry forward Occam’s razor to simplify syntactic operation through rethinking theoretical basis of DP hypothesis, analyze itsdeficiencies and put forward corresponding solutions for its problems. In other words,based on principle of economy, principle and parameter theory as well as NP+underbasic logic frame of human language, this paper attempts to explore solutions forproblems of DP hypothesis, which includes redefinition of D. Finally, a conclusion ismade in this paper: determiner can only refer to articles like “a” and “the” in English,which are used as complement in a noun phrase to show representation feature ofhuman language; a noun phrase can be shorted for NP, which is different from theone based on generative grammar; namely, NP proposed in this paper is composed ofa head N and a complement; due to representation of human language, thecomplement can be placed on the right or left of the head N, and can also be omitted:...