Syntax 7:1, April 2004, 1–54
COMPLEX NOUN PHRASES AND LINKERS Marcel den Dikken and Pornsiri Singhapreecha
Abstract. Complex noun phrases crosslinguistically contain meaningless elements whose sole function is to serve as linkers of predicates to their subjects—thus, Mandarin Chinese de links inverted AP predicates to their subjects as well as possessors, PPs, relative clauses, and noun-complement clauses (e.g., the claim that John was asleep). Taking a comparative analysis of French de and Thai thˆı i as its point of departure, this paper argues for a maximally generalized account of the noun phrases in which linkers occur, in terms of DP-internal Predicate Inversion. This approach prompts an analysis of relative-clause constructions that recognizes relative clauses as predicates of DP-internal small clauses, combining the attractions of the traditional approach and the Vergnaud/Kayne raising approach by assigning relative clauses an internal structure similar to the traditional one while giving it the external distribution of a predicate by treating it as the predicate of a noun- phrase-internal small clause. For noun-complement clauses, the approach leads to a revitalization of Stowell’s (1981) predication approach to the relationship between the head noun and the clause, the latter serving as the former’s subject in a DP-contained small-clause structure. A uniform linker approach to French de, Thai thˆı i, Mandarin Chinese de, Japanese no, and so on (a) emphasizes the pervasiveness of Predicate Inversion in the noun phrase, (b) confirms the role of linkers as purely functional aides to the inversion operation, (c) furthers our understanding of the structure and derivation of complex noun phrases, and (d) presents a particularly interesting window on microparametric variation in the syntax of noun phrases.
1. Introduction Noun-phrase-internal constituents ascribing a property to the head noun can be inserted as attributive modifiers in most languages. The examples in (1a)–(3a) illustrate this for English, French, and Thai, respectively. An alternative to attributive modification that all three languages offer for the (a) examples, however, is a strategy by which the property-assigning constituent is separated from the head noun’s projection by a meaningless linker element—of in English (1b), de in French (2b), and thˆı i in Thai (3b).
* Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 11th annual meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistic Society (SEALS XI), Bangkok (Thailand), May 18, 2001, and at the GLOW Collo- quium held at National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu (Taiwan/Republic of China), January 6, 2002. A version of the paper presented on the former occasion, focusing on the Thai facts and much narrower in scope than the present paper, appears in the proceedings of this conference (Den Dikken & Singhapreecha 2001). We thank the audiences present on those occasions for their comments and questions. We would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for Syntax for their comments, Lisa Cheng and Andrew Simpson for making their work on Mandarin Chinese de available to us, James Matisoff for his help with Lahu ve, and those who responded to our query on SEALANG (esp. Paulette Hopple) for their feedback on Burmese thii/i. The responsibility for any remaining errors resides entirely with the authors.