This work is a revision of my 1995 University of Rochester dissertation (refer- enced as Zamparelli 1995, distributed as a Cogsci technical report in 1996), intended for web distribution. Most of the changes consist of footnotes added or modified; ref- erences have been updated when necessary, and an index has been added at the end. There are also minor revisions in the text, particularly in chapter 1, “Preliminaries” and section 4.3, “Spec/head agreement.” Needless to say, these changes do not mean that I have tried to make the dissertation fully consistent with my current thinking on the structure and interpretation of DPs. I have, however, inserted pointers to later work when possible. The dissertation is to be published by Garland, in the series “Outstanding Disser- tations in Linguistics”. Note that, due to changes in the format and content, the page numbers in this ‘draft’ distribution version differ both from the numbers in the 1996 Technical Report and from the Garland edition. Section numbers and titles differ very occasionally from those in the 1995/96 original, and are identical to the Garland Layers in the Determiner Phrase edition. It is advisable to use these when citing. The author can be reached at the following address: Roberto Zamparelli Facolta` di Lingue Universita` di Bergamo University of Rochester P.zza Vecchia 8 24129 Bergamo, Italy REVISION: tel: +39-035-277239 e-mail: [email protected] FEBRUARY 2000 ii Acknowledgments A careful observer of academic life might have noticed that, toward the end of their dissertation, graduate students spend a lot of time in the library, browsing through dissertations. They are not collecting references, but samplying acknowledgment sections, in order to write their own. Indeed, a class that teaches the art of writing acknowledgments is sorely mis- sed. As for wedding invitations, there seem to be two styles; some students thank everybody, for speaking, listening or just existing at the right time and place; others thank very sparingly, only Those Who Truly Helped. Anything in between is felt to be unfair to the names that didn’t quite make it—the boundary cases. Of course, the longer the list, the more boundary cases. The moral is: fair acknowledgment is impossible. Having said this, I move on to write one of these unfair, mid-of-the-road acknowledgment sections. First, many thanks to my advisor, Greg Carlson, who listened to a lot of strange ideas on the way to this text, and always had helpful remarks, suggestions and point- ers, even when my ideas concerned aspects of linguistic theory that were far from his domain of expertise. He has been a source of constant encouragement through the years. Having Sandro Zucchi as a professor in Rochester, as a committee member for my dissertation, and as a friend has been a big privilege. He has shaped the way I do linguistics as perhaps nobody else has, giving me an incredibly generous amount of his time, the most detailed comments, and the sharpest criticism. He made arguing fun. I owe to Itziar Laka a sense of what it means to look at syntax with the Big Ques- tions in mind. Her provocative style of teaching is one of the best I have encountered, and has had a big influence on me. Our ideas on how to play life and linguistics are very different, but her viewpoint is powerful, and I respect it. With her, I wish to thank all the professors who played a role in shaping my education: Tom Bever, Yoshi Kitagawa, Peter Lasersohn, Jeff Runner, Len Schubert, Mike Tanenhaus and several more. Special dissertation thanks to Chris Barker—discussions in his office were frequently enlightening (Westerners can be Enlightened over and over)—and to Whitney Tabor. iii iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Finally, Pino Longobardi is not in my committee only for logistic reasons. The semester I spent in Venice, working with him, is at the origin of this dissertation, which is largely based on his views of the syntax/semantics interplay. Likewise, I want to thank Guglielmo Cinque, Gennaro Chierchia, Giuliana Giusti, Valentina Bianchi and all the other linguistically important people of the time spent in Italy, for extremely interesting discussions and comments. Abstract Sometimes, writing a dissertation on the syntax/semantics interface seems like having to write a seamless document in two languages. Talking with my fellow students in both fields has been a big help in sorting things out. In particular, thanks to Massimo Poesio, Naoya Fujita, Janet Hitzeman, Koji Hoshi, Daniel Ardron, and Julie Sedivy. A truly special thank to Graham Katz. We have gone a long way The main focus of the dissertation is on the existence of multiple structural layers together. within noun phrases, and the claim that each layer is endowed with a different se- As this text was taking shape, I came upon two dissertations that changed it mantic function. In particular, I will focus on the topmost part of the noun phrase, deeply; one is by Andrea Moro, the other, by Louise McNally. I owe them a great the one containing determiners and quantifiers, proposing that this part should be deal. split into two maximal projections which together constitute the ‘determiner system.’ My life in Rochester would have been much less rich experience without the I propose that the highest maximal projection contains ‘strong’ determiners (in the ‘Barnfell’ Coop. Thanks to all the Barnfellites (Barnfallen?), and in particular to Bev- sense of Milsark, 1974), proper names and personal pronouns, while the intermediate erly Spejevski, Boris Goldowski and Derek Gross. Also, thanks to Roberta Colon, projection contains those determiners that can appear in predicative position (indef- for reminding me of many deadlines, and to Harold Paredes-Frigolet, for forcing my inites, plus the definite determiner in a well-specified set of cases); below this layer, mind away from linguistics in the darkest days of Deep Writing. On the typographi- we have other functional projections, and finally the NP proper. cal side, the look of this dissertation is due to the authors of GNU Emacs and LATEX, The existence of multiple functional projections raises the question of how their but in equal measure to our local wizard, Chris Giordano. I don’t know what I would heads can be licensed. I will argue that in some cases, an abstract functional head have produced without him. Last but not least, Becca Webb, Jeff Runner, Whitney can be licensed if a modifier of the appropriate type is generated or moved into its Tabor and Greg Carlson corrected my English, a major and occasionally amusing specifier. In English and Italian, movement to this specifier position is usually visible task. through the appearence of the preposition “of” (di in Italian). This will account A large part of the past years has been spent in Italy. Having a lot of friends that for a variety of ill-understood constructions across Romance and Germanic, such as gave me a charge to endure Rochester’s long winters was probably instrumental in the ‘kind’-construction (“this kind of car” and “a car of this kind”), which will be finishing. Without my family, and without Birgit, I doubt I would have ever made it. uniformly reduced to small-clauses plus raising, in parallel with current analyses of To them, my deepest gratitude. copular constructions at the sentential level (“John is the culprit” and “the culprit is John”). Taken together, the idea of multiple levels with different interpretations and the idea of noun-phrase internal raising to specifier position will be a powerful tool to explain the behavior of object clitics in Italian, the presuppositional aspect of the strong/weak distinction for determiners, the different distribution of noun phrases within There-sentences in Italian and English, and the internal structure of a special kind of definite predicates in copular constructions. Finally, in the last chapter I will turn to an examination of the internal structure of the Adjective Phrase across Italian and English, giving evidence that many of the phenomena identified at the Noun Phrase level can be found in the Adjective Phrase as well. The semantic reflexes of these syntactic phenomena can explain the presence or absence of presuppositions associated with adjectives and measure phrases. The analysis will be cast in a general Government and Binding approach (Chom- v vi ABSTRACT sky, 1981, Chomsky 1986a, Chomsky 1986b), also using some notions from the Minimalist Program of Chomsky (1992), Chomsky (1994). Contents Introduction 1 1 Preliminaries 5 1.1 Semantics preliminaries: type-shifting . 5 1.1.1 Problems for invisible type-shifting operators . 8 1.1.2 Type-shifting and specificity . 9 1.1.3 Quantifiers: e-type at LF . 11 1.1.4 Introduction to the layer system . 14 1.1.5 The semantic contribution . 18 1.2 Syntactic preliminaries: the DP hypothesis . 19 1.2.1 Functional projections . 20 1.2.2 N-movement . 21 1.2.3 The relative position of N and attributive adjectives . 22 1.2.4 Attributive adjectives in predicative position . 25 1.3 What this dissertation is not about . 29 1.4 Data . 29 1.5 Terminological conventions . 31 1.6 Overview of the contents . 33 2 The Strong/Weak Distinction and the Definiteness Effect 37 2.1 Introduction . 37 2.2 The ‘strong/weak’ distinction . 38 2.2.1 Existential Sentences . 38 2.2.2 Numerals in ES . 40 2.3 Treatments of the Definiteness Effect . 44 2.3.1 Milsark (1977) . 44 2.3.2 ES in Generalized Quantifier Theory . 45 2.3.3 Heim on WHs in ES . 48 2.3.4 Presuppositional Set Theories of ES . 50 2.3.5 McNally (1992) .