Noun phrases and their syntactic structure in languages that do not have articles
What is it about?
This book presents a comprehensive investigation of nominal expressions in languages which lack the category of articles. It aims to present the inventory of functional categories in the nominal domain by analyzing the internal elements of nominal expressions and their semantic and morpho-syntactic properties. The main objective of this study is to argue for the existence of a layered functional structure of nominals, and the presence of, among other functional projections, the DP projection in languages which lack the category of articles.
Why is it important?
Theoretically, the study contributes to the debate on the inventory of functional projections in the nominal domain in languages that lack articles. The study is mainly based on empirical evidence from Uzbek, an under-studied Turkic language, which is then compared and contrasted to data from English, Romance languages with articles, Slavic and other Turkic languages. The emphasis is given to the inventory of functional categories associated with interpretative meaning of nominal expressions and how languages with articles and languages without articles elaborate various means to express this meaning in their syntax. Moreover,the study investigates structural properties of Uzbek nominal expressions with the aim of contributing to the on-going debate about the structure of noun phrases and to a better understanding of noun phrases in general, of syntactic variation in this domain, and of the validity of the DP-based hypotheses from the perspective of languages without articles.