Clac Círculo Clac Determiners as Modified Pronouns

This paper challenges the notion that the structure of the Determiner Phrase (DP) contains a virtual category which answers for DPs’ referential and anaphoric uses. Some current DP proposals, for instance, assume a null pronoun to account for the nominalized Adj(ective) in Romance, while others in Germanic postulate an abstract operator (or demonstrative) to derive the specificity of definite DPs. Such accounts strip the D(eterminer) of denotative function, turning it into a mere locus for Agreement and Case features. Moreover, they run afoul of an important notion which laid the foundation for the DP analysis. This is the hypothesis that D is a variant form of P(ronoun). For instance, Postal (1969) equates the definite D with the third-person P, as do earlier grammarians like Bello (1847) and Jespersen (1924), who further identify it as a Dem(onstrative). If these authors are on the right track, it would appear that the definite D already has the attributes that the null categories in the current DP proposals are trying to capture. Following the lead of the earlier authors, I argue that the reference of various uses and interpretations of nominals may be straightforwardly derived, if DS are viewed as modified Ps. In the DP analysis, D is a functional head modified by a clause or predicate, while P is a D with no complement. On such a structural basis, the reference of definite vs. indefinite DPs may be traced to the different discourse functions of two types of D, by assuming that the definite D is a form of the third-person P, and the indefinite D is a variant of the numeral one (Perlmutter 1970). In contrast to competing