Determiners as Functors: Np Structure in Italian

This article ooers a comprehensive HPSG treatment of determiners within the Noun Phrase, accounting for their rich variety as regards distributional behaviour, category features, dependency relations and semantic contribution. To introduce the reader to the empirical problems at issue, a contrastive examination of English vs. Italian data is carried out at various points in the work, but the Romance language in particular is focussed on; especially the study of co-occurrence restrictions on Italian determiners is detailed and systematic. On the other hand, the suggested solutions go beyond language-speciic considerations and provide evidence for a revision of HPSG that gives due prominence to the notion of`functor', resulting in a formally simpler approach to head-speciier dependencies and an improved version of the Semantics Principle, inter alia. The paper is divided into three main sections: section 1 brieey summarizes some general theoretical background which will be presupposed in the rest of the work; section 2 ooers an extensive discussion and preliminary analysis of data concerning determiners and related issues; section 3 presents the formal treatment in terms of revised HPSG. 1 Background According to standard semantic accounts, a determiner is taken to denote some function that yields a generalized quantiier qua Noun Phrase denota-tion from thèrestriction' set or property denoted by the nominal head. 1 A 1 We will stick to the traditional { although not uncontroversial { assumption that the constituent made up by a determiner and its nominal sister be nominally headed. In section 3.1 we will brieey defend it from the alternative ooered by the so called`DP Analysis'.