Determiner phrase

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Examples

In the determiner phrases below, the determiners are in boldface:

  • a little dog, the little dogs (indefinite or definite article)
  • this little dog, those little dogs (demonstrative)
  • every little dog, each little dog, some little dog, either dog, no dog (quantifying)

In linguistics, a determiner phrase (DP) is a syntactic category, a phrase headed by a determiner. In English and many other languages, determiner phrases have a noun phrase as a complement.[1][2] This is opposed to the alternative view that determiners are specifiers of the noun phrase. The overwhelming majority of grammarians today adopt the DP hypothesis in some form or other.

Determiners govern the referential or quantificational properties of the noun phrases they embed. The idea that noun phrases preceded by determiners are determiner phrases is known as the DP hypothesis. The DP hypothesis goes very well with the theory of generalized quantifiers, which is the prevailing theory of the semantics of determiners.[3][4]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Szabolcsi, A. (1983). The possessor that ran away from home. The Linguistic Review 3.
  2. ^ Abney, S. P. (1987). The English Noun Phrase in its Sentential Aspect. Ph. D. thesis, MIT, Cambridge MA.
  3. ^ Montague, Richard: 1974, 'The proper treatment of quantification in English', in R. Montague, Formal Philosophy, ed. by R. Thomason (New Haven).
  4. ^ Barwise, Jon and Robin Cooper. 1981. Generalized quantifiers and natural language. Linguistics and Philosophy 4: 159-219.
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