DPs: I got it backwards

[ROOD DAVID S]

John,
	I got my layers backwards in the previous message.  The highest
phrase should be the specificity phrase, with he/le/ka (traditionally the
demonstratives) as its head; the comp of that would then be a DP with the
article as its head; and the NP would be inside that.  We need to invent a
name that doesn't sound so much like "specifier" for "specificity.
	Some evidence:

	N+ article is fixed word order; DP + specificity can have the
particle either before or after the phrase (but I don't think it's free
variation)

	the specificity particle (a.k.a. demonstrative) can substitute for
the whole construction in a pronoun-like way.

David S. Rood
Dept. of Linguistics
Univ. of Colorado
295 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309-0295
USA
rood at colorado.edu

On Mon, 20 Feb 2006, ROOD DAVID S wrote:

>
> I have thought about this a little, but more from the semantic angle than
> the syntactic one.  I think that in Lakota the he/le/ka set marks
> specificity rather than (or in addition to) deixis, while the "ki/waN'
> particles mark definiteness in the sense of old information/uniqueness.
> That is why the head of a relative clause is usually marked with both the
> INDEFINITE article and a demonstrative.  To say something like "the boy
> who saw the horses told us about them" you need the equivalent of 'there
> was a certain boy; that boy saw the horses;  he told us about them'.  In
> Lak. "[[[[boy a] that] horses saw] the][ he.told.us"].
> 	To me that implies TWO layers of phrase structure, a DP headed by
> he/le/ka, and a specificity phrase headed by ki/waN/cha/eya/etaN etc.
> 	And that's why the "ki" is always postposed, but the "he" set can
> either precede the N or follow N+ki.
> 	There are also a lot of cases where the sequence N+ki+dem looks as
> if the "dem" were really some kind of resumptive pronoun, kind of like
> "the boy, he told us about it".  I have no solid evidence for that
> intuition, however.
> 	Best,
> 	David
>
>
> David S. Rood
> Dept. of Linguistics
> Univ. of Colorado
> 295 UCB
> Boulder, CO 80309-0295
> USA
> rood at colorado.edu
>
> On Mon, 20 Feb 2006, Jan F. Ullrich wrote:
>
> >
> >
> > > jpboyle at uchicago.edu
> > >
> > > anyway).  In Missouri Valley the structure is:
> > >
> > > Demonstrative Noun-Determiner
> >
> >
> > Lakota allows two structures:
> >
> > 1) Demonstrative Noun Determiner
> >
> > 2) Noun Demonstrative Determiner
> >
> >
> > Jan
> >
> >
> >
> >
>