Extraposition and Definiteness Effects in Icelandic Dps

This paper investigates the morphosyntax of the Icelandic DP following work by Sigurðsson (1993, 2006); Julien (2005). In addition to providing an analysis of the basic structure of the Icelandic DP, this paper investigates two (apparent) movements within the DP: one involving the definite article suffix -inn, and one involving pronominal possessors (e.g., minn ‘my’). I show that the fronting of pronominal possessors cannot be analyzed as movement, and instead must indicate a use of pronominal possessors as demonstratives. In contrast, the suffixed article does involve movement, and I argue that it is phrasal movement, contra the head movement accounts proposed by Sigurðsson (1993, 2006). I show than an analysis where the prenominal article and suffixed article occupy the same syntactic position cannot be maintained, which is surprising given that they never surface at the same time. Coupled with the is a requirement that PP complements to N extrapose to the right edge of DP, which is thus another case of the strange behavior of complements to N in Scandinavian languages (see Hankamer and Mikkelsen (2005, 2008) on Danish). Finally, I briefly investigate the syntax of some cases in English where apparent semantic complements do not occupy a syntactic complement position.