DPs and Demonstratives

Bryan Gordon linguista at gmail.com
Mon Feb 20 19:15:59 UTC 2006


Personally, I'm sceptical of the designation "demonstrative" in general. It
seems to be used to ascribe both deictic capacity and the syntactic
behaviour of determiners under the same category - which is clearly NOT
appropriate for Siouan. Is it possible that Siouan deictics don't c-command
D at all, but are contained within NP?

- Bryan Gordon

On 2/20/06, jpboyle at uchicago.edu <jpboyle at uchicago.edu> wrote:
>
> Hi All,
>
> I am just looking at noun phrases that have both a determiner and a
> demonstrative.  I was wondering if anyone else has looked at these besides
> Randy and Catherine (who should of course feel obligated to reply to this
> e-mail
> anyway).  In Missouri Valley the structure is:
>
> Demonstrative Noun-Determiner
>
> I think this is true for other Siouan languages as well, correct? Has
> anyone
> thought about how to analyze these constructions (specifically in an X'bar
> framework)?  Are they DPs that have a demonstrative phrase (DemP) in SPEC
> and
> an NP complement (as in 1)?
>
> 1) [[Dem P [NP ]]DP]
>
>             DP
>             / !
>   DemP   D'
>             /  !
>          NP  D
>
> This would make it all left branching, which is what we would assume,
> right?
>
> Or are they DemPs that take a DP Complement that then take an NP
> complement
> (as in 2)?
>
> 2 [Dem P [[NP DP]]]
>
>           DemP
>               !
>           Dem'
>             /  !
>      Dem  DP
>                 !
>                 D'
>                / !
>             NP D
>
> This structure would be both right branching and left branching (possible
> but
> not as pretty).  Is there any evidence for either analysis?
>
> Thanks
>
> John Boyle
>
>
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