Functional Categories in the Nominal Domain

0. Proposal. A central debate in the study of phrase structure concerns the nature of functional projections which dominate lexical ones. At one extreme is the position, advocated by Cinque (1999, 2002), that grammars employ a universal set of functional categories and that their number and relative order is the same across languages, regardless of properties of the lexical head. At the other extreme is the weaker position, adopted among others by Grimshaw (1994) and Bošković (1997), that only independently motivated phrase structure is projected, with considerable disagreement about what constitutes appropriate “motivation”. While the literature is overwhelmingly concerned with resolving this issue with respect to clausal structure (i.e., the extended projection of the verb), here we consider nominal structure and argue for the weaker position. We conclude that not all potential functional categories of the extended projection of the noun are realized in all structures.