Agreement, disagreement and the NP vs. DP debate

Abstract

Of special relevance for the NP vs. DP debate are nominals in which the determiner has other values for number, gender, case and/or person than the noun, for depending on whether such nominals share these values with the noun or with the determiner they provide evidence in favor of either the NP or the DP approach. This paper discusses some nominals of this kind and shows that they share the relevant feature values with the noun. It then develops an NP analysis for these nominals which is cast in the notation of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. It also shows what a DP analysis would look like. A comparison reveals that the NP analyses are less complex, more uniform and less stipulative. Examples are taken from Dutch, English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish and Serbo-Croatian.

Implicit Representation of Grammatical Gender in Italian Children with Developmental Language Disorder: An Exploratory Study on Phonological and/or Syntactic Sensitivity

“…Again, children with DLD have also been found to display syntactic impairments in relation to complex structures/sentences (such as double-object alternations–e.g. in Italian saying “ Ho visto ” instead of “ L’ho visto ” [“ I saw ” versus the more appropriate form “ I saw it ”]), anaphoric reference, passives (see van der Lely & Harris, 1990 ; van der Lely & Stollwerck, 1997 ), and determiners (e.g., in Italian, saying “ Passami palla ” in place of the more appropriate form “ Passami la palla ” [“ Give me ball ” instead of “ Give me the ball ”]; Bortolini et al, 1997 ; Cipriani, Bottari, Chilosi & Pfanner, 1998 ). Specific comprehension impairments include difficulties in comprehending syntactic structures (Marini, Tavano & Fabbro, 2008 ) and grammatical components of language such as the determiner system (Bortolini et al, 1997 ; Cipriani et al, 1998 ; Clahsen, 1991 ; Fraser, Bellugi & Brown, 1963 ), as well as deficits in lexical-semantic organization (e.g., word-finding and vocabulary issues; Sheng & McGregor, 2010 ).…”