On NPs and Clauses

In Bošković (2008a) I argue that there is a fundamental structural difference in the traditional Noun Phrase (TNP) of English and article-less languages like SC, which can be captured if DP is not even present in the TNPs in (2) (see also Fukui 1988, Corver 1992, Zlatić 1997, Chierchia 1998, Cheng and Sybesma 1999, Lyons 1999, Willim 2000, Baker 2003, among others for no-DP analyses of at least some article-less languages). My main argument for a fundamental difference in the structure of TNP in languages with and those without articles concerns a number of syntactic and semantic generalizations where articles play a crucial role. In this paper I will strengthen the argument by adding several new generalizations that were not discussed in Bošković (2008a). Several of these generalizations involve a surprising interplay between TNP internal syntax/semantics and clause-level phenomena, which shows that many clause-level phenomena cannot be properly understood without paying close attention to the internal structure and interpretation of TNPs. I will also explore consequences of the internal structure of TNP for the internal structure of clauses under the assumption that the two have parallel structure. Taking the TNP/Clause parallelism hypothesis and the NP/DP parameter seriously leads to the conclusion that just like the structure of TNP is poorer in NP languages than in DP languages, the structure of clauses should be poorer in NP languages than in DP languages. I will start by briefly summarizing the generalizations from Bošković (2008a). I will then discuss a number of new NP/DP generalizations and then turn to the issue of TNP/Clause parallelism and consequences of the structure of TNP and TNP internal processes for the structure of clauses and clause-level processes.